Most of the time when I tell people I’m studying Human Factors Engineering, I get a blank stare or an “oh, so you mean the human side of engineering!” I respond with “Kind of!” and launch into my elevator pitch on what Human Factors Engineering (HFE) is…
“It was formerly called Engineering Psychology,” I say, “It’s actually synonymous with the term ergonomics. We often only think about physical ergonomics—take for example that chair. Someone designed it, chose who fit in it, who didn’t fit in it, influencing how we interact with it, etc. We can also think about cognitive and social/organizational ergonomics as we design products, interfaces, systems, and even jobs.” Cue more confusion on the face of whomever unknowingly prompted my tangent.
Since sometimes us HFE folk have a hard time describing our field in a few sentences, I’ve decided to write this post covering 3 things you didn’t know about Human Factors Engineering (HFE). We will start, quite naturally, with answering the question “what the heck is HFE?”
Thing 1: What is HFE?
The International Ergonomics Association defines ergonomics (human factors) as follows:
Ergonomics (or human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of interactions among humans and other elements of a system, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance.
Practitioners of ergonomics and ergonomists contribute to the design and evaluation of tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems in order to make them compatible with the needs, abilities and limitations of people.
Ergonomics helps harmonize things that interact with people in terms of people’s needs, abilities and limitations.
International Ergonomics Association, “What is Ergonomics?”
As the IEA definition clarifies, the nature of HFE is that it is multi-disciplinary and applied, leaning heavily on design. It pulls ideas from many domains to create actionable insights that impact people’s ability to do their best work, safely and joyfully.
In Designing for People: An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering, the authors (including UW Professor John Lee) say that HFE “aims to make technology work for people” along three dimensions: safety, performance, and satisfaction. The value placed on each of those dimensions may vary greatly, as you could imagine, depending on the application. For example, we may focus more significantly on safety when we design a plane than when we are designing a word processing software where performance or productivity is the focus.
However, in any of these cases, HFE must keep all three goals in mind to produce effective solutions.
Thing 2: How do people use HFE?
HFE is field of diverse methods and applications used to achieve the three goals discussed above: safety, performance and satisfaction. Tools in the HFE toolbox include heuristics, usability study and design, process and workflow mapping, participatory and user-centered design, contextual inquiry and qualitative research methods, FMEA and other error-reduction strategies, and many, many more.
A central tenant of HFE is systems thinking, or approaching problems with a wide view and attention to interaction, iteration, and emergence. HFE never blames a person for their error, but rather looks at what “perfect storm” of system qualities allowed for errors to occur.
As such, you can imagine that HFE is both used to study systems after something went wrong (a product of poor system design) or intervene before error occurs by designing for optimal human-system interaction.
An Example
After a long day of work, I walk to my car. My phone alerts me that I need to stop at the pharmacy on my way home to pick up my prescription. I hop in my car and start driving home, and next thing I know I’m parked in my driveway. Dang it! I meant to stop for my prescription.
This seemingly mundane example is showcasing a really awesome and challenging thing about our brains. On one hand, isn’t it convenient that you don’t have to think really hard about your drive home? On the other, your ability to follow your usual path meant you made an error this time. You weren’t able to divert from that path.
HFE would look at this example and say, how can we design the system to support my intent to stop at the pharmacy? Maybe we can create an alarm that will sound when if I make the turn away (towards home) from the pharmacy. Or plan to pick up my prescription at a time where I’m not doing such an ingrained task. Or maybe if there was a post it note on the dashboard, I would have remembered!
Now just imagine we are talking about a task that a surgeon does every day. How can we support them to do the tasks (which might be similarly ingrained), while preventing errors that might be the difference between life or death for their patients? This is where HFE gets really interesting.
Thing 3: Why is HFE important?
And for any of you who are still wondering why HFE would matter to you or your field, here’s the quick two-bullet summary:
- HFE concepts apply to everything you do and all the things you interact with (e.g. your screen time, how safe our cars are, job motivation)
- Understanding HFE concepts allow you to align the world to produce what you intend through thoughtful re-design (e.g. reorganizing your phone to produce a result of less screen time, designing cars so that they are less distracting to the driver, creating jobs that are challenging and engaging to employees)
In Summary
HFE is a discipline with the power to create a world that works for everyone. Luckily, every field could stand to evaluate its workability and take a systems approach to re-designing and developing itself actually produce its intended outcomes.
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Thanks for reading this far! Stay tuned for the next article in my series: Why Engineers are Essential to the Future of Health Care
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Are you an HFE researcher or practitioner? How to you describe what you do? Comment below or tweet at me to start a conversation.