Dianna Deeney, Author at Quality During Design

Getting Comfortable with using Reliability Results

We want to engage a reliability engineer in an analysis for our product design. They can help us produce some great information from which we can make decisions. You might be feeling uncomfortable about our team making a design decision based on those results. You don’t quite understand how the reliability engineer came up with…

How to Self-Advocate for More Customer Face Time (and why it’s important)

There are many stories of design successes attributed to the right level of understanding of the customer. Product designers make decisions, daily, about how a product is going to look and perform. So, we need to really understand the customer. And, to really get the customer, engineers need to spend time with them. Sometimes, the business doesn’t want us to interact with…

Choosing Quality Tools (Mind Map vs. Flowchart vs. Spaghetti Diagram)

Within our quality toolbox, there are a lot of graphical organizers. Some are better at fulfilling different goals than others. If we have a goal in mind, then we may choose a certain tool. However, we don’t want analysis paralysis about which tool is best to stop us from using any tool at all. I share my 3 general guidelines about choosing a graphical quality tool, how to draw them, and…

The DFE Part of DFX (Design For Environment and eXcellence)

Design for Excellence (DFX) is a concept that includes many initiatives, like design for usability, design for manufacturability and assembly, and design for environment and disassembly. It’s a focus on doing things right, exceeding customer expectations, optimizing what’s needed while minimizing costs, and continuous improvement. Today we take a deep dive on one of those…

Results-Driven Decisions, Faster: Accelerated Stress Testing as a Reliability Life Test

We want to ensure our designs perform reliably, as expected and intended. With today’s high-reliability products and quick release to market, we probably don’t have enough time to just test our parts at normal use rates. It would take too long, because our products ARE so reliable. Or, we’ll miss our window of opportunity to get our product to market. There are several ways to get…

When to use DOE (Design of Experiments)?

What is design of experiments, or DOE? What do we use it for and what is it all about? We talk about when we might want to use it during the design cycle, and we do this without getting into all of the how-to and mathematical equations. Transcript Expand What is design of experiments, or…

Design for User Tasks using an Urgent/Important Matrix

We’ve collected all sorts of preliminary information about our users that we’re using for a new product design. We may be faced with so much data we’re not sure where to turn first, or what design feature is a priority. There’s a simple, 2-way matrix we can use to help us sort it all out: an urgent/important…

Statistical vs. Practical Significance

When we’re looking at results (like measures of a characteristic), we need to take care not to get too hung-up on what the statistics is trying to tell us. Yes, statistical tools are a good way for us to make decisions and the results can act as proof for us. But, there’s a practical, engineering side to results, too. We need to evaluate the statistical significance along with…

How Many Do We Need To Test?

In this episode we review sampling for design tests. We talk through a generic thought process for choosing a statistically relevant sample size and propose some basics that we can all learn about to better understand sampling. Our goal is for us to be able to better talk through a sampling scenario with our quality…

Life Cycle Costing for Product Design Choices

It costs our customers to own our designed products. It costs them initially to purchase it, but it also costs them to use it, maintain it, repair it, and eventually dispose of it. And it costs our company in ways too, like processing, training requirements for customers, and warranty repair costs. Life cycle costing can…