Humans are one powerful entity in a system since they have the abilities to control the system itself, hence it is important to understand how their interaction between the system. According to the Handbook of Industrial and Systems Engineering by Badiru (2006), Human Factors are a science that investigates human behavioral, cognitive, and physical abilities and limitations in order to understand how individuals and teams will interact with products and systems.
Human Factors engineering is the discipline that takes this knowledge and uses it to specify the design, and test systems to optimize safety, productivity, effectiveness, and satisfaction.
To design a system that has effective human-system interactions, understanding how people think, act and what outcome of those actions is essential. Hence, these four aspects need to be examined: cognition, behavior, performance, and reliability. Cognition is humans’ abilities to acquire and understand information.
Studying human cognition means examining their abilities to form a piece of new knowledge, memorizing, reasoning, making decisions, solving problems, etc. On the other hand, evaluating behavior means predicting how humans operate within the systems.
Humans behave based on experience and the cognitive perception they have towards the system; Hence, it is essential how these sources affect humans’ reactions to the system. Designing a system also requires considering how the system affects the performance and how reliable the system is for humans to operate.
It is critical to provide a system interface aligned to how human process information could speed up the time needed for completing actions. Moreover, it could also reduce the possibility of human error and failure which leads to performance loss.
These four elements provide a foundation for creating less human-error-prone systems that could boost efficiency as a whole. Moreover, considering human factors could reduce costs productions, quality, and support since most of the human-caused risks are already examined during the design process; Hence, reducing the possibility of reworks, maintenance, and repairs.
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