These lecture notes were not written as a course handout, but as a resource for lectures. Therefore, references and comments will not always be complete.
(part 1 of 5)
"Most engineering systems are tools: workshop tools are used to magnify and refine the mechanical skills of the human hand; transport is a tool for moving human around a comfortable and speedy manner ; computer systems are a tool to support information processing. With all of the systems, the design objective is to optimise the performance of the person and the machine together as a system.
In very simple cases optimising the machine itself is equivalent to optimising the human-machine system; for example improving the design of a lathe may improve the accuracy of work which can be accomplished using it. Increasingly however, there is a need to optimise the human-machine system as a whole; in the case of the lathe poor design of the controls (gearing) can lead to poor quality work even though the basic capabilities of the machine have been enhanced".
Andrew Downton.
Optimising the human-machine system requires an understanding not only of the machinery itself but also an understanding of how human beings respond to given situations, how they achieve their goals using devices, how they come to choose the particular actions they choose, how they learn to operate particular artifacts, and so on. More generally it requires knowing, why they do what they do when they do it. The study of why human being do what they do when they do, given certain task objectives is the point of this course.
The lecture course is divided into three parts. These are (1) Discovering Human Factors, (2) Design Relevant User Characteristics, with special emphasis on Basic Psychology for Human Factors and (3) Evaluation Methods in Human Factors.
The field of Human Factors is huge, with lots of different viewpoints and lots of data, way too much to cover in a 10-week introductory lecture course. Therefore, we will aim to give a conceptual introduction, hopefully to help you begin thinking about HF philosophies, theory and practice for yourselves. Because the course is largely conceptual, there will be few facts for you to learn, which may frustrate you, and it will require you to think about things deeply. There aren't always right or wrong answers to many of the questions we raise, there are often simply opinions. The point is to make your opinions principled. You will get some practice of mobilising these opinions in the tutorials.
We don't know how many of you have any kind of experience or background in HF related work, but we are assuming no knowledge, so forgive us if we am introducing concepts which you know already.
To say a few words about the course: the first part of the course is really aimed at introducing some concepts, terms, some background, context and practices within Human Factors.
The first lecture addresses the question "What is Human Factors" and will give you some definitions, some useful terms and some historical context for Human Factors practice. These are discussed more later so we will leave details until then. However, it is important to always note that the role of the human factors expert within the design of any artifact varies according to viewpoint (philosophical view of the user and of the place of the Human Factors expert within design (i.e. how important their contribution is considered to be), the artifact being designed and its intended distribution and finance). We will also examine your preconceptions about what makes good design (e.g. using Payne, S.J. (1995) Naive judgments of stimulus-response compatibility. Human Factors, 37. 495-506.)
The second lecture addresses "Why we need human factors" and will give some examples where human factors work is applied post hoc to analyse the cause of accidents, and so on. This is by way of raising awareness of why consideration of the operating characteristics of the human operator is important in design. The difficulties of assigning error blame will be raised by highlighting the behavioural, cognitive psycho-social, and broader contextual factors that can lead to actions being selected, actions that may later be deemed 'wrong'. Further, some taxonomies of error types will be introduced to help you become aware that there are alternative consequences from error-full behaviour depending on the nature of the error. Some examples of principles will be considered - for example, Norman (1988). As Nickerson concluded in 1969 (cited in Lindgaard, 1994) "the need for the future is not so much computer oriented people as for people oriented computers". This goes for any artifact, we reckon.
The final lecture in the first part of the course will consider "Design relevant user characteristics", which will introduce four ways of looking at the human user. Of course, this division is not hard and fast, but we offer it as heuristic (i.e. a rule-of-thumb) for dividing up things we need to consider about users. These are 1. anthropometrics, 2. behavioural issues, 3. cognitive issues, and 4. social issues. (ABCS)
The second part of the course will deal with specific characteristics of the human operator. We will concentrate on the psychology of the human operator, partly because we think it is the most important part, partly because that is our expertise and partly because we think it is the most interesting area. Anthropometric research is readily available in a number of books and you can look things up pretty easily. With psychology, this is not so easy, as generalisable design relevant principles are not so readily available. As there is so much to know within psychology, the lectures will simply introduce topics as being of relevance to designers, and give some cursory information about the relevant processes. For example, we will touch on some interesting issues in perception, in vision and hearing within one lecture. There are entire courses which focus on certain aspects of these so you can imagine that 30 minutes will never do them justice. However, we believe it is important to simply raise awareness of relevant issues. The important thing is to acknowledge that there are some baseline processing capabilities that are characteristics o the human operator. Beyond that, there are useful regularities in behaviour and thought patterns which may be exploited in design. Having raised the issues we will try to illustrate how they are applicable to the design of objects. Although we will give a few facts and some principles, some of these will be contestable. This is not problematic in itself and illustrates the need for principled critiques and analyses.
The final part of the course will introduce the design process and some evaluation methods that are used in HF research. Again, there are so many approaches it is not possible to cover them all. However, it is possible to give a broad brush sweep and introduce certain categories of evaluation.
Although those are the formal lectures, we will be showing a number of videos, some of which are purely for fun and others that you may find useful when thinking about the set exercises. Do come along if you can. I will let you know when I have a slot about these.
Hopefully at the end of the course you have acquired a few buzz words and begun thinking about design and about designing with the human operator in mind. This being the case, you will be able to pursue answers to specific questions armed with a conceptual outlook and an idea of some of the tools at your disposal. As I said in the course handout, this course will not make you human factors experts, it will simply give you some view as to what constitutes human factors work.