APPLE MESSED WITH a cardinal rule of industrial design when it made the iPhone 6. The glassy screen, 5.5 inches on the diagonal, was too large for people with small hands to reach the top. To compensate, the company introduced Reachability—a quick double tap of the home button that shifts the screen’s apps downward two inches, into the range of tiny hands.
The feature wasn’t so much a salve for ergonomic oversight as it was an acknowledgement of an unfortunate truth: When building something for millions of people, one size can’t fit all.
Humanscale was a masterpiece of information design, and arguably one of the first interactive data visualizations. It’s a relic, but it's also regarded among industrial designers as the gold standard of human engineering statistics. Today, the disks have been replaced by more technologically advanced tools, like proprietary digital ergonomics databases that design firms can license for thousands of dollars.
For IA Collaborative, letting the Humanscale disks fade into obscurity would have been a missed opportunity. “They're still just as relevant today as when they were just launched,” Ritter says. The designers are starting with reissuing the original disks and books, but eventually they plan to digitize the information and create an interactive interface for the data. They figure most designers could use an easy tool for making their designs be more about the people they’re designing for. “You can design anything in the vacuum,” Westra says. “But if you’re not considering the people who are going to use it, they're not going to have a great experience.”
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