Human Factors

The Human factors (HF) user group resources will define a set of use cases and scenarios that will feed the concepts necessary for exchange in order facilitate the use of human factors in systems engineering. The term 'systems engineering' is used to describe the interdisciplinary field of engineering that focuses on the design and management of a system over the whole lifecycle.

HF is the application of human factors methods to develop systems with an effective, comfortable and user friendly design. HF seeks to avoid HF issues which are typically problems in which humans do not work with the system in a way as expected thus negatively impacting the overall system performance. When properly applied at the design stage, HF reduces situations where the human does not act or behave as expected. 

The discipline of HF involves many methods such as data collection, task analysis, cognitive task analysis, human error identification, situation awareness analysis and interface analysis techniques. The implementation of these methods and the results they produce must be orchestrated around the existing design process of a project. HF is multidisciplinary and takes place across the entire lifecycle. The implementation of methods can only be done with meaningful input from the system design and for maximum effect; the results must be fed back into that design.