Human factors

Human factors (also known by its acronym, HF; hereinafter, HF) is the scientific study of influence of human characteristics called factors on interactions between people and other entities that form one system, as well as those interactions themselves.

Trivia

Ergonomics vs HF

Two terms, HF and ergonomics, are often used interchangeably. Some view them as essentially synonymous.

However, ergonomics is more commonly applied to interactions between a human and non-human components of a system, while HF more frequently refers to both human-to-human and human-to-non-human interactions.

Ergonomics emerged as a science of labor in the middle of the 1800s. More than a hundred years later, in the late 1900s, HF emerged as a science to reduce human errors initially in aviation.

Definitions

According to the International Ergonomics Association,

Ergonomics (human factors) is the scientific discipline concerned with the understanding of the 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.

History

To reduce human errors, the aviation industry developed the crew resource management (CRM) training for airplane crew in the 1980s. The HF term was initially used to indicate the science behind this training.

Because of CRM success, both training and science behind it were spread to aircraft maintenance known as maintenance resource management (MRM) in the 1990s. Later, some other industries such as nuclear energy and cyber-security, as well as occupations such as information architects started contributing to this scientific study.

Human-to-non-human

Main wikipage: Human-machine interaction

HF and systems engineering

Systems engineering.

User interface

Main wikipage: User interface