Human factors
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"Human factors" is a term used mainly in the United States. Variants include "human factors engineering", an extension of an earlier phrase, "human engineering". In Europe and the rest of the world, the term "ergonomics" is more prevalent. Cognitive ergonomics is another term used.
"Human factors" is an umbrella term for several areas of research that include human performance, technology, design, and human-computer interaction. It is a profession that focuses on how people interact with products, tools, procedures, and any processes likely to be encountered in the modern world.
Human factors practitioners can come from a variety of backgrounds; though predominantly they are psychologists (cognitive, perceptual, and experimental) and engineers. Designers (industrial, interaction, and graphic), anthropologists, technical communication scholars and computer scientists also contribute.
Whereas ergonomics tends to focus on the anthropometrics for optimal human-machine interaction, human factors is more focused on the cognitive and perceptual factors.
Areas of interest for human factors practitioners may include the following:
workload, fatigue, situational awareness, usability, user interface, learnability, attention, vigilance, human performance, human reliability, human-computer interaction, control and display design, occupational stress, visualization of data, individual differences, aging, accessibility, safety, shift work, work in extreme environments including virtual environments, human error, and decision making.
Simply put, human factors involves working to make the environment function in a way that seems natural to people. Although the terms "human factors" and "ergonomics" have only been widely known in recent times, the field's origin is in the design and use of aircraft during World War II to improve aviation safety.
[edit] The human-machine model
The simple man-machine model provides a convenient way for organizing some of the major concerns of human engineering:
- selection and design of machine displays and controls;
- [[layout and design of workplaces;
- design for maintainability.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
Organizations
Agencies
- Tools and Methods in Human Factors
- NASA Human Factors Research and Technology Division
- FAA Technical Center Human Factors Laboratory
- FAA Human Factors
Projects
External resources
- Bad Human Factors Designs
- ErgoWeb, the leading ergonomics list-server and online forum
- www.office-ergo.com Straight talk about ergonomics training at a non-commercial sitede:Menschlicher Faktor
| This page uses content from the English-language version of Wikipedia. The original article was at Human factors. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with Psychology Wiki, the text of Wikipedia is available under the GNU Free Documentation License. |
