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Bay Area Chapter of HFES
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This page presents some Q & A to a few questions I have gotton about human factors & ergonomics.
Erik, I'm interested in any info, websites, resources, etc, that you may be able to provide concerning human factors, in general, and also grad programs that have recognized/well respected human factors programs. I suspect I could surf the web for a lot of it, but, being relatively new to it, I'd appreciate having something from a practicing professional in the field.
This should give you plenty to browse:
See http://www.geocities.com/ergonomicintro/ergonomics.html
What is Fitt's Law?
As you may or may not know, occasionally human factors get criticized in a variety of ways - usually from people who don't know much about HF. Here are the top 6 with some explanation.
1) It is only common sense.
This often comes from people who look at a product or system and say "well, that's obvious (that is should work that way...), that is just intuitive and seems like the right thing to do." The reason that things seem easy is because the person who designed it *thought carefully* about it when coming up with the design. The pull down menu, is a pretty good example. How they work seems obvious to most people now, but they took many years to develop. To new computer users, it "seems obvious" once they are shown how to use them.
See also McCormick and Sanders in their 1993 version of Human Factors in Engineering and Design, who state," Knowing how large to make letters on a sign to be read at a specific distance ro selecting and audible warning that can be heard and distiguished from other alarms is not determined by simple common sense..."
2) Humans can easily adapt to a system, no matter how poorly it is designed.
This is in regards to systems that are poorly designed, and are usually spoken by designers who *did not* use human factors in their design (that is, they did not involve regular people [not including other people from the design team] in the design process; this is seen frequently in military systems. I worked on a Navy Radar Operator Console a few years ago. The NAVY sends new officers to school for 1 year, just to learn how to use the system. It is overly complex and the operator must memorize many numbers and seemingly un-related text elements - and then operate in a confined often hot or very cold, highly stressful environment.
3) Any good engineer can become a Human Factors Engineer (HFE) expert by taking a short course or reading a book.
There are over 30 established graduate programs in the U.S. and many others in Europe, Australia, England, more. While other engineers can benefit from courses in Human Factors, they cannot become experts - in the same way one cannot take one physics class or a class in Spanish and become and expert - if anything, one class can help one to appreciate human factors and Human Factors Engineers more.
4) HF is cosmetic.
You have probably heard of "ergonomically designed chairs" and cars with "ergonomic interiors" lately. These are sexy and appeal to the masses and "ergonomic" anything seems to be a good buzz word over the last 5-10 years. But human factors is more than just cosmetics - it is (should be) part of the design process from conception - not something done after a product is built.
5) HF is meant to be applied after the fact.
This is only benficial for the design of the next generation of systems (or to build a competiting system). Human Factors Engineering needs to be part of the entire design process - where users ans potential users and their needs are involved and influence the system being designed. Engineers can design systems that work wonderfully for a few people, but designing for many people (or for a specific population of people who are not exactly the same as the engineer) needs to involve human factors methodology.
McCormick and Sanders (1993) state: "Human factors is not just using oneself as the model for designing things...human factors recongnizes individual differences and the need to consider the unique characteristics of user populations in designing things for their use."
6) Most system failures are caused by human error only.
This is what you hear a lot about airline accidents. "The accident was due to 'pilot error.'" Sounds like a great way to pass blame and sure, it is true that the pilot may have pushed the wrong button or forgotten a procedure, but most of the time, the actual reason the wrong decision was made can be traced to poor design (or lack of testing the design). The classic case is the mix up of landing gear and wing flap controls in World War airplanes. - Pilots kept crashing due to "pilot error" when in fact the reason they were crashing was due to the design of these 2 controls - there were placed next to each other and were the exact same shape! It was determined that *this* was the cause for many accidents, and thus, a set of unique controls were made so that the pilot would be able to easily know which control was for each function.
Erik
I just read the salary survey. It seems a little low. My offers were $35k, $46k, and $50k.
Yes, the survey's are low. The salary survey was from November 1995, so I would add about 3% per year, roughly. So instead of $35K to $46K, it might be about $42 to $55K for 2001. Rough, but I think this is would be in the ballpark.