Design life — Reliability engineering
I was browsing through articles on reliability engineering and chanced on the word reliability engineering. And yes, i also came across an article called design life and that intrigued me.
I am often on a search to understand business of design better — in terms on digital products, looking for examples in other models of problem solving — including engineering and architecture. And so i read futher.
So whats Reliability engineering?
Reliability engineering is a sub-discipline of systems engineering that emphasizes dependability in the lifecycle management of a product. Dependability, or reliability, describes the ability of a system or component to function under stated conditions for a specified period of time.
So what’s Design life?
The design life of a component or product is the period of time during which the item is expected by its designers to work within its specified parameters; in other words, the life expectancy of the item. It is the length of time between placement into service of a single item and that item’s onset of wearout.
What are the different types of Design life?
- Longevity based — design something so that it lasts for the specified period of life.
- Purpose based — design something that meets a specific need, and may fail in other uses.
- Safety based — Durability is important for devices that are important for safety of life and limb.
- Bio-degradable — Durability could be a problem is some cases and designing for graceful degradation is a good thought process.
- Planned Absolence — Sales are often attributed to re-sales by customers. If some products lasted forever, customers would not dump them and go for newer ones.
Can we uncover these in Digital products?
- Mission critical — Applications that can’t fail mid-way. Tools that need to have industrial usability. What would happen is you closed your browser just when you transferred a thousand dollars from a payment gateway and the page refresh? better still it was un-intentional.
- Promote Efficiency — Making feature accessible, without having to do multiple hops, which could slow you down?
- Graceful degradation — what happens when you access an application in a unintended form factor, life a mobile application on a television screen? Would graceful degradation still make it usable
- Fixed termed licenses, and upgrades — you remember the familiar feeling when the application you have upgraded does not anymore accept new upgrade or work properly.
I realize that we covered Safety, degradation, absolence and Purpose but not one for longevity in the general . Are there examples for the same.
The question is what does reliability design mean for Digital products. Are there other ways to look for these for life of a software product?
If look at it from a usage perspective it could be
- Linear Single use — software products that you may use for a single time. For example you file taxes through the government websites, or do something to enter a SMS code into a software before accessing a different software.
- Linear Multiple use — software products that follow a uni-directional flow. It has a start and end, and it always follows the same structure.
- Non-Linear multiple use — Products with multiple features that have to be used/ configured on a regular basis to achieve something.
- Collaborative — products that have messaging features, or collaborative workflows, which involve multiple individuals on social or official basis.
Reliability engineering seems an interesting subject and possibly user experience design needs to look at keenly to understand the features that are needed. Websites and app designers need to be aware of how the product needs to be designed to meet its intended purpose.
