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All 4 Flashcards — Percentiles
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Question
What is a percentile?
Answer
The value below which a given percentage of a population falls. The 5th percentile of reach means 5% of people reach less far than that.
Question
Reach or clearance — which percentile?
Answer
Reach is set from the SMALLEST user (5th percentile); clearance is set from the LARGEST user (95th percentile).
Question
Why is the 50th percentile usually the wrong design choice?
Answer
It fails half the population by construction, and nobody sits at the 50th percentile in every dimension at once. It suits only dimensions where being wrong either way is harmless.
Question
What does the 5th-to-95th percentile range cover, and why stop there?
Answer
90% of the user population. Covering the last 5% at each extreme usually costs far more in mechanism and tooling than it gains in users, so it is excluded as a stated decision.
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Topic 1.1 hub
Ergonomics
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