Which? Ergonomics

Tanya Heasman of System Concepts is on the Council of Management of the CA. In this article she provides some insight into their work.

Magazines

As some of you will know, the Consumers' Association publishes the subscription magazines Which?, Health Which?, Gardening Which? Holiday Which? and Drug and Therapeutics Bulletin. Through these magazines, CA provides authoritative, research-based information on a wide range of consumer products and services. It also publishes a family of books, from the 'Good Hotel Guide' to '420 Legal Problems Solved'. For those of you conducting tax self-assessments, it also offers a TaxCalc software package to help you prepare your returns. Other services include Which?Online, (an internet service provider), the Which? Legal Service, the journal Consumer Policy Review, and a service provided by a wholly owned subsidiary, Anglia Business Associates, which analyses small businesses' bank statements to identify calculation errors made by the banks.

Campaigning activities

Perhaps not so well known are the campaigning activities. CA's mission is to provide information to enable people to make informed decisions about the goods and services that they buy; and also to campaign for improvements to goods and services for all consumers. Current campaigns include Communications and Utilities, Financial Services, Food Standards and Safety, Health, Redress, Retailing, Car Prices and Freedom of Information. Other campaign-related activities include consumer education through schools and colleges, the environment and energy issues, central and local government issues, regulation, and competition policy.

Council meets in CA's Central London offices seven times a year, and at each meeting, discusses a variety of issues from supermarket 'lookalikes' to the appointment of new members of the management team. There are two other sites, the Research and Testing Centre in Milton Keynes, and the Customer Service Centre (CSC) in Hertford. At CSC, they process all the orders for magazines, books and other products. They also respond to all calls to the helpline service on 0645 123580, which can range from setting up a subscription direct debit, or ordering a product factsheet, to finding out when the next report on digital cameras is due. The Which? Legal Service also operates from Hertford, offering help and legal advice if something goes wrong with goods or services you have bought.

Research and Testing Centre

At the Research and Testing Centre products are tested for issues including reliability, ease-of-use, energy consumption, ease-of-setting-up, accuracy, performance, and other features. During a recent visit I saw testing of washing machines, bathroom scales (two that I used registered readings which were half a stone apart) vacuum cleaners (I now know that you can buy 'standard' dust for testing such items), and secateurs (set up on a rig cutting through a wooden stick every fifteen seconds). CARTC also carries out some external work, mainly for governmental organisations. One such project is concerned with testing hand pumps for use in developing countries. It is usually children (often quite young children) who are sent to draw water, so the force required to use the pumps must be appropriate for their strength. To provide information on ergonomics issues, CARTC maintain a 'user panel' of people from the Milton Keynes area who give their time to test out the usability characteristics of the products.

A thorough and detailed review of performance involving Council and CA's internal Management team takes place once a year. Policy issues, product development, a review of the programme of work carried out in the past year, and planning of Council's programme of work for the next year are examined at a two-day event one weekend in October. This also gives Council members, who live all over the UK, the opportunity to meet each other and the Management team on a more informal basis than is generally possible at the regular Council meetings.

More information

If you would like more information about CA's activities and products, please visit their website at www.which.net. I would also welcome any comments/feedback from newsletter readers about CA - please email me at tanya@system-concepts.com

Tanya Heasman, 2-Feb-2001