Dr Martin Fracker
I’m an engineering psychologist and human factors consultant with 40+ years of experience spanning the U.S. Air Force, IBM, and independent consulting.
UX Rescue
If your business is losing ground, the cause is often the same: people are struggling against systems that weren’t designed with them in mind.
- Employees fight through workstation software instead of working efficiently
- Visitors can’t find what they’re looking for on your website
- Customers get frustrated using your product and go elsewhere
I’ve spent decades diagnosing exactly this kind of problem — from Air Force cockpits to Fortune 500 call centers — and I bring that same rigor to your business. I’ll assess what’s actually going wrong, back it with evidence, and lay out a clear path to fix it.
Value pricing: we agree upfront on a fixed price tied to the value we expect my work to bring your business.
Other Ways I Can Help
Problem: You have an existing application or prototype that feels like it could be better, but you can’t pinpoint why.
What I Do: I evaluate your application or prototype against established human factors and UX principles, identify exactly where it’s failing users, and recommend specific, actionable fixes.
Problem: You’ve launched a project to design a new product or service, but no one on the project team has the human factors or UX training to catch problems before it ships.
What I Do: I join your project design team as the embedded human factors expert. I evaluate proposed interfaces, review prototypes, and flag human-performance problems while they’re still cheap to fix. Where I find issues, I recommend the specific changes needed to resolve them.
Problem: A complex back-office system is quietly draining your bottom line — through turnover, lost productivity, or both — and no one’s been able to say exactly why.
What I Do: I diagnose the root causes through user research, staff interviews, and usability testing, then redesign the workflow around what the evidence shows. Instead of guesses, you get recommendations and prototypes backed by evidence, designed to reduce costs and improve retention.
Problem: You need occasional senior human factors and UX judgment, but there is not enough volume to justify a full-time hire or an agency retainer.
What I Do: I offer a lightweight retainer — a few hours of advisory time a month, a focused design review, or a rapid usability gut-check — not the costly, overhead-heavy retainers typical of large UX agencies. You get senior-level insight, directly from me, without paying for a team you don’t need.
Why Bring Me In?
- Job analysis for aircraft maintenance, electronics, and financial systems.
- Engineering psychology for assessing and improving pilot performance.
- Managed Human Factors Engineering professionals and researchers.
Select Case Studies
- Used job analysis to improve complex technical training for new airmen at five Air Force Technical Training Centers. Improved the readiness of graduates for their first military job assignment based on feedback from their supervisors.
- Developed measures of pilot situation awareness at the Human Engineering Laboratory at Wright-Patterson AFB. Used these to identify and then reduce obstacles to successful pilot performance.
- Oversaw the development of expert systems (precursors to AI) at the Human Resources Laboratory at Brooks AFB. These systems enabled first assignment airmen to perform their jobs more effectively with shortened learning curves.
- Human-Computer Interaction, Enterprise Applications, and UX Consulting with Fortune 500 clients across multiple industries.
- Worked directly with clients and IBM sales teams on proposals and presentations.
- Managed a marketing-automation technology consulting practice during the final six years of my IBM career.
Select Case Studies
- Helped First USA Bank (now Chase) and American Express redesign their call center workstations to improve representative productivity by reducing call time by 7 percent.
- Worked with International Truck & Engine to design and build better workstations that improved plant operator efficiency, resulting in 6% faster error-free assembly times.
- Helped a major beverage company get more from its online advertising by analyzing how visitors used its website, making its ads five times more likely to be seen and clicked.
- Helped international clients Bancolombia and Tangerine Bank improve their use of marketing automation technology, resulting in twice as many customers receiving and responding relevant marketing messages.
Select Case Studies
- Helped a geographically dispersed organization discover why members weren’t using Zoom to attend important monthly meetings. With those reasons understood, the organization was able to double Zoom attendance.
- Applied UX principles to redesign the website of a local charitable organization, improving communication across the organization and quadrupling volunteer participation in its activities.
- Applied cognitive engineering and UX design principles to redesign two local church websites, resulting in a 10 percent increase in service attendance for one and a 20 percent reduction in administrative phone calls for the other.
- Ph.D. in Engineering Psychology, University of Illinois
- Doctoral studies under Dr. Christopher D. Wickens, a leading engineering psychologist
How to Get Started
- Book a free strategy call. We’ll talk through your challenges and what success would look like for your business.
- Define the scope together. We’ll agree on exactly what needs to be done to solve the problem.
- Receive a fixed-price proposal. The price is based on the value a successful solution brings your business, with no hidden fees and no surprises. Once you approve it, we get started.