‘I have a cellphone that doesn’t behave like a phone: It behaves like a computer that makes calls. Computers are becoming an integral part of daily life. And if people don’t start designing them to be more user-friendly, then an even larger part of the population is going to be left out of even more stuff.”

So said Alan Cooper, the father of Visual Basic, in 1999—eight years before the release of the first iPhone. Today, Cooper’s observation holds true as a general statement about new technologies. Whether you’re talking about the latest consumer smart device or a sophisticated measurement tool, user experience (UX) matters.

On the shop floor, UX can mean the difference between parts being measured properly or not, which in turn leads to manufacturing defects being caught before they’re shipped to the customer (or not).

In the bygone days of metrology and manufacturing quality, UX naturally took a back seat to accuracy and precision. Today, more metrology companies are recognizing how much the latter can be affected by the former when human operators are in the mix.

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