The different thing is about the parties that are involved in testing. Since my target audience is the robot builders (i.e., humans), I not only need to make the survey easy to understand for myself, but also for them. However, I am not them, and we are actually very different individuals. So I test the survey by myself many times first, and then ask a native English speaker to proofread it, and then ask a potential participant to test the survey. After I correct the errors and make changes, I need to ask more people check it again if time allows. To the contrary, a robotics engineer is working with the robot and environment alone, so he/she only needs to deal with the robot. All time it takes to do the testing and programming is his/her own time. The ones I ask to help me are busy people who do a great job in their areas. I hesitate to bother others, but I have to ask them for help. This is the nature of my work. I really appreciate those people who stepped out of their way to help me check and test my survey. Gratitude is beyond words.
When I was getting my research survey ready for the robot builders and their robots, I thought of one similarity and one difference between the work of a human factors researcher and that of an engineer. The similar thing is that it takes *so much* time to do the designing and testing. For the research survey, I need to consider the display logic, fonts, size, color, space between paragraphs, page break, clarity of each sentence, grammar, question format, numbering of the questions, validation settings, logo, and research questions behind. I made changes and then reviewed the survey from a participant's perspective, doing it again and again. After working on the survey for months, I thought I was able to finish it by midnight, but ended up at 6:30am. After sleeping for 5 hours, I still felt uncertain about some items. Then I worked for another 8 hours to review questions and think about the reasons to change and how to change. I think a robotics engineer would have similar tasks. For either autonomous robot or not, every single change needs to be tested, and every single parameter in the environment can cause problems and the robot builder has to revise and test again, again, and again, and again, and again...
The different thing is about the parties that are involved in testing. Since my target audience is the robot builders (i.e., humans), I not only need to make the survey easy to understand for myself, but also for them. However, I am not them, and we are actually very different individuals. So I test the survey by myself many times first, and then ask a native English speaker to proofread it, and then ask a potential participant to test the survey. After I correct the errors and make changes, I need to ask more people check it again if time allows. To the contrary, a robotics engineer is working with the robot and environment alone, so he/she only needs to deal with the robot. All time it takes to do the testing and programming is his/her own time. The ones I ask to help me are busy people who do a great job in their areas. I hesitate to bother others, but I have to ask them for help. This is the nature of my work. I really appreciate those people who stepped out of their way to help me check and test my survey. Gratitude is beyond words.
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