Human Factors Part 1

Engineering and the Human Factor

In the last hundred or so years a new science has been introduced to the various industries of the world. This science, known as human factors, has made great strides in areas such as usability, safety, situation awareness, work load, and efficiency. Yet it has also run into its own problems. The vast majority of individuals out there, be they engineers, scientists, workers, managers, or any of the miriad professions out there, do not understand what human factors is.

To put it as generically as possible, human factors is the science of how humans interact with and become an intregral component of a system (be it mechanical, software, or environmental). The field involves the diciplines of psychology, engineering, human-machine interface, human-system interface, ergonomics, and safety.

Coming out of this science is an even newer discipline. The Human Factors Engineer. This individual must have an integral understanding of how the human behaves to a given stimuli,situation, or technology in order to aid technical innovators, systems engineers and leaders in applying known standards in order to affect the techonology.
Of course, this only explains what a Human Factors Engineer does in a broad sense. It gives an idea of the disciplines required to be effective, and hints at current issues hendering it's continued importance. So what does human factors engineering do for anyone?

Let's start with the direct impact to the consumer. It is often said that form follows function. In this day of computerized everything, the great battle in both form and function is being fought by two giants who offer perfect examples. Microsoft, and Apple. One company has, through business strategy and a "be everything to everyone" mentality, become the number one computer software business in the world. The other, through the ability to cater to the user and developing a form that a good deal of people find easy and stylish, has been able to great inroads on its competitor while making great strides in expanding product lines. Neither company would be able to compete against the other if it weren't for the thousands of hours spent in usability testing for every piece of hardware and software either company manufactures.

That is simply an immediate example of how human factors (in this case the study of human-system interface) impacts our every day consumer decision. Let's look at the industry that, arguably, human factors arose from, aviation. Safety is paramount in the aviation industry. If an aircraft is not safe, it won't sell. If an airline has a poor safety record (or even a perceived poor safety record) it will not be successful. Yet when an accident happens, seventy to eighty percent of the time a phrase is used that agitates the accident investigator, safety professional, and human factors engineer. This phras is "pilot error". It is not that this phrase is necessarily incorrect that causes such angst, but rather that it does not mean anything. The pilot made an error. What does such a statement tell us? Nothing. Pilots are highly trained professionals. Everything they do has a purpose based on experience and technology. That they make an error is simply human, understanding the underlying psychological and technological reasons for that error can prevent it from happening again. This is the guiding principle that has made our fastest form of transportation also our safest.

But let me relate the disconnect between engineers and human factors engineers. In a recent experience of my own a group of human factors specialists were aiding a systems engineering team in dry-run testing of a new meteorology system for the United States Marine Corps. During the course of testing, there was a problem with the upper air sensor. This sensor gathers data from a GPS enable radiosonde on temeperature, wind speeds, wind direction, and upper air pressure. The sonde is attached to a helium filled balloon that can climb as high as sixty-thousand feet before the balloon pops and the whole thing falls out of the sky. A Marine techinician and I managed to troubleshoot the system and launch a sonde that gathered the proper data. There was nothing particularly difficult about this. Yet I was struck that evening, over beer and dinner with the engineering team, when the program manager began expressing surprise and pleasure in how quickly the technician and I had solved the problem, and at how we then sat down and used the system to gather the needed data without any training whatsoever. He was surprised at the initiative, but also at the fact that a person in human factors could, and would, do such a thing. All of this he expressed to me.

Why? I asked myself, was this so surprising to me. After months of observation of many different projects and the human factors scientist involved (in truth they were research scientists and the word engineer does not belong any where near a reference to them) I began to realize something. 1) Nobody understands why human factors people are involved in a project, and 2) most of the human factors people tend to be psychologist, with little to no technological and engineering capability. In short, the people designing the systems don't see fellow engineers in a human factors team, they see a bunch of psychologists whose inputs to a project often cost a lot of money and time, but provide little in the way of impact to the system.

The biggest problem however, is not the outside worlds understanding of human factors, it is the internal dynamics of the science and the people who currently control it that causes the problem. Human factors specialists, especially in system design and acquisition, are overrun by psychologists (you begin to understand that I am highly critical of psychology as a science even though it is critical to what I do). And while psychology is an extremely important science, the lack of technical ability in most psychologists means that most human factors teams literally don't know what to do or, even in the rare case where they actually do know what to do, cannot represent their ideas to the individuals in the necessary fashion. In short, they are not engineers and cannot speak to or influence the engineers they work with. This is compounded by the low respect their total lack of technical exprtise brings to the field.

This brings me the main point of this post. The name of the field is human factors engineering. Most people insist on placing emphasis on human factors and disregard the engineering aspects inherent in the discipline. I would like to propose a new focus for the science. Engineering for the human factor. Not Human Factors, and certainly not Human Engineerin. Unfortunately such a discipline does not currently exist in education. Why? Most individuals who end up involved in human factors (again, not necessarily true human factors engineer) come out of either the psychological profession or the medical profession. Both bring absolutely necessary components to the makeup of human factors the science, but they lack the understanding and ability required to impact the technologies through human factors engineering.

So given that industry doesn't really understand human factors, and that human factors is generally made up of people from disciplines that, while necessary, are not the total of the science, it is time to give some thought to what goes into the making of a good human factors engineer. The disciplines of psychology, human-system interface, engineering, software design, usability, physics, mathematics, etc. All should go into a curiculum that creates competent human factors engineers who are well rounded in the required knowledge and have the ability to speak confidently in all areas. These individuals will be skillfull enough to become not just tertiary parties to system design, but integral members of the engineering team. Individuals whose knowledge and technical expertise will bring the science of human factors into a respected light. Most of all, creating these professional will mean that the next time I tell someone I'm a human factors engineer the response will be "Cool"! Rather than, "what's that"?

In the next post I'll take a closer look at the human factors ENGINEER, and we'll explore how vital a discipline it is (and how it can save your system time and money all while providing that "gee whiz" factor that will make it a hot sell).