Human Factors Team at Intuitive

At Intuitive, we believe products should be easy to learn, straightforward to use, reliable, integrated, and add true value. Great products are consistent, familiar, and—of course—intuitive.

In this article, we speak with Kate Knudsen, Senior Director, Human Factors to learn more about the Human Factors team at Intuitive. This team, in collaboration with the larger User Experience team, helps ensure every product in the Intuitive ecosystem delivers true value to surgeons and hospitals across the globe.

Since making the first hire on the current team in 2016, Kate Knudsen, Sr. Director, Human Factors has seen the team grow rapidly to a group of around 40 people today. This growth reflects the importance of their work and how much of what we produce as a company depends on their input to make our products as safe and effective as possible. 

 Kate explains, "How I like to frame what my team does is that most of the clinical folks are focused on what is happening in the patient, while my team concentrates on what happens inside the operating room (OR)—how staff and surgeons are interacting with our products. We study things like 'Do they know what button to press?', 'Do they know when to plug something in?', and 'Is there an action they need to take?' We study the human interactions with our products."

In practice, this often means putting our products in front of the user and seeing how they interact with them. Often, Kate's team will host surgeons and OR staff at an Intuitive site, have them use our products—perhaps by simulating a surgery—and observe what works really well and where they struggle. The team might be looking at anything from the optimal size and shape of a control knob, to whether a message appearing in the surgeon's view is easy to read or if it needs to be color-coded. They must also think about the different potential attributes and abilities of users—the differences in height or hand size, for example, or the variations in strength or dexterity between different team members in an OR. Only by testing with many different users and many different iterations can we ensure our products meet the needs of our diverse customers. 

 The team is an integral part of the product development lifecycle and is called upon to get involved from when an idea is in its earliest concept phases. This helps ensure that everything we create pays proper attention to the requirements and constraints of the end-users of our technology.

Kate adds: "We always bookend everything we do with asking whether we can make things safer and more effective. Then we look at the product development cycle and maximizing usability—can we make it more desirable? Can we make it simpler? Then, we go back to where we started with maximizing safety and efficacy, demonstrating to regulatory bodies that our products are safe and effective. This is why our team slogan is: maximize usability and minimize risk."

At its heart, the work of the Human Factors team is—perhaps obviously—about people, and this is what Kate finds most appealing about the work. "I love interacting with our users and understanding what works for them," she says. "And I also love building and growing my team and evolving our function. It's a double-win for me to be able to do both."

Kate joined Intuitive in 2015 and has been in her current position for around five-and-a-half years. Her journey includes degrees in bio engineering, years working in research and development, and consultancy work writing user manuals, documentation, and reports, and uncovering user needs. It was while working as a consultant that Kate first walked through the doors of Intuitive—around 10 years ago—to provide regulatory and documentation support, before coming in-house to build out the team.

The challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic have fortunately not dramatically impacted their ability to achieve their goals.

"As a team, we have been lucky that we have still been able to be on campus a fair bit. It is hard to do a lot of our work without being physically present—we need to be physically interacting with products and engaging closely with our customers. So, throughout COVID-19, we have still been running studies and we have still met with customers and flown out to different sites—with appropriate safety measures in place, of course. Like everyone, the team has been juggling new things, so while it has certainly been harder in the past year, we have still managed to make great progress," Kate says.

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This article was originally created by Adam Lane from Intuitive’s Employee Communications & Engagement Team.