Stan Caplan
June 22, 2025
After having played racquetball, I was sitting in the fitness center with ice on my old knees so they would keep me going enough to play another day. Another senior citizen approached me and asked “did you work at Kodak?” and I gladly said I did. That question wasn’t surprising because I live in Rochester New York, the home of Kodak and the home of many thousand retirees from the days when Kodak had up to 60,000 employees in the area. His next question was “did you work in Copies Products?” and I proudly said “I was in the Human Factors Group and supported the Coper Products line of business”. His unexpected response to that surprised me. “Oh, Human Factors! You’re the guy that wasn’t liked!”. That silenced me while I processed what he had said and how to respond. I don’t remember anyone telling me they didn’t like me. Then it occurred to me and I said “I probably didn’t endear myself to some of the designers who asked me to take a look at a subsystem they had built and I had to tell them there are usability problems with their design”. At that point, we introduced ourselves to each other and recalled the good old days at Kodak. Somehow, Charlie had recognized me from about 45 years ago, but I didn’t recognize or even remember interacting with Charlie then. We now see each other often in the fitness center and always acknowledge each other. The point of relating this story is to give a real example of the result when providing Human Factors support late in the development process compared with providing it early and often. Here is the rest of the story.
In the first couple of years of supporting Kodak copier development, I sat with the rest of the Human Factors practitioners who were supporting other Kodak departments. That’s apparently the time period when I was “the guy that wasn’t liked”. The copier people would contact me later in the development cycle when a design issue came up or they wanted an evaluation of a prototype and I would often have to give them bad news. Except for one particular copier person, I didn’t have a meaningful relationship with anyone. For the most part, I was OUT OF SIGHT, OUT OF MIND. Then Coper Products management got wise and things changed. They put me in their budget for full time support and gave me a full-time office with the project team. That made a world of difference. I was in a position to participate in the fuzzy front end of projects and throughout the rest of the development cycle including doing user research studies. I even participated in product launches. I was able to earn credibility from both practitioners and from Copier Products management. Lesson learned that I applied for the rest of
My Career: FIND A WAY TO BE VISIBLE AND ENGAGED.