What could be the Human Factors performance criteria?
Note: Re-edit (Human Factors in Engineering, Article #38, written in March 31, 2006)
“Performance” is the magic answer offered by university students to questions like “What is the purpose of this course, of this method, of this technique, or of this design?”
Performance is what summarizes all the conscious learning in the knowledge bag, for lack of meaningful full sentences available in the language to express clear purposes.
It takes a couple of months to wean the students from the catch word “performance” and encourage them to try thinking harder for specificity.
There is a hierarchy for this abstract notion of “performance”.
The next level of abstraction is to answer: “What kind of performance?“.
The third level should answer: “How these various performances criteria correlate? Can we sort them out between basic performances and redundant performance criteria?”.
The fourth level is: “How much for each basic performance criterion? Can we measure them accurately and objectively?”
It seems that every discipline has created for itself a set of performance criteria and they are coined in stone, so that an insertion of another element into that set, is like a paradigm shift in its field of science.
If you prompt a business or engineering university student to expand on the meaning of “performance”, when supported by a specific example, it might dawn on him to spell out another piece of jewels such as: “max profit”, “minimize cost”, “improve quality”, “increase production”, “save time”, or “increase market share”.
In order to reach a finer level of specificity we need to define functionally, for example, what “max profit” means. A string of monosyllables rains from every where such as: “increase price”, “cut expenditure”, “sell more”, and again “improve quality”, “save time”, or “increase market share”. If we agree that profit is a function of market share, price, expenditure, added values of products, and marketing services then we can understand what could be the basic criteria and which criteria dependent on the basic ones.
How can a business improve performance?
How can it make profit or cut costs?
Should the firm layoff redundant employees, force early retirement, dip in insurance funds, contract out product parts and administrative processes, eliminate training programs, scrap off the library or continuing learning facilities, streamline the design process, reduce advertising money, abridge break times in duration or frequency, cut overhead expenses such as control lighting and comfort of the working environment, stop investing in new facilities, firing skilled workers, settling consumer plaintiffs out of court, searching for tax loopholes, or engineering financial statements? How can a business increase its market share? How can it survive competitors and continually flourish?
How can a firm improve products for the quality minded engineers?
Should it invest on the latest technological advancements in equipment, machines, and application software, or should it select the best mind among the graduates, or should it establish a continuing education program with adequate learning facilities, or should it encourage its engineers to experiment and submit research papers, or should it invest on market research to know the characteristics of its customers, or should it built in safety in the design process, or perform an extensive analysis of the foreseeable misuses of its products or services, the type of errors generated in the functioning and operation of its products and their corresponding risks on health of the users, or manage properly employees’ turnover, or care about the safety and health of its skilled and dedicated workers, or ordering management to closely monitor the safety and health standards applied in the company?
At the first session of my course “Human factors in engineering” I ask my class: “What is the purpose of an engineer?“
The unanimous answer is: “performance”. What are the criteria for an engineer? The loud and emphatic answer is: “performance”!
At the first session of my class I repeat several times that the purpose of the engineering discipline is to design practical products or systems that man needs and wants, that human factors engineers are trained to consider first the health and safety of end users, the customers, the operators, and the workers when designing interfaces for products or systems.
At the first session I tell my class that the body of knowledge of human factors is about finding practical design guidelines based on the capabilities and limitations of end users, body and mind, with the following performance criteria: to eliminate errors, to foresee unsafe misuses, to foresee near-accidents, to design in safety operations, to consider the health problems in the product and its operation, to study the safety and health conditions in the workplace and the organizational procedures, to improve working conditions physically, socially, and psychologically, and to be aware of the latest consumer liability legal doctrines.
A month later, I am confronted with the same cycle of questions and answers, mainly: “What is the purpose of an engineer?” The unanimous answer is: “performance”. What are the criteria for a human factors engineer? The loud and emphatic answer is: “performance”!
A few students remember part of the long list of human factors performance criteria, but the end users are still hard to recognize them.
A few students retained the concept of designing practical interfaces or what an interface could be but the pictures of end users are still blurred.
I have to emphasize frequently that the end users could be their engineering colleagues, their family members, and themselves. I have to remind them that any product, service, or system design is ultimately designed for people to use, operate, and enjoy the benefit of its utility.
Human factors performance criteria are all the above and the design of products or services should alleviating the repetitive musculo-skeletal disorders by reducing efforts, vibration, and proper handling of tools and equipment, designing for proper postures, minimizing static positions, and especially to keep in mind that any testing and evaluation study should factor in the condition that a worker or an employee is operating 8 hours a day, 5 days a week, and for many years.
I tell them that any profit or cost cutting is ultimately at the expense of workers/employees, their financial stability, safety standards, comfort, and health conditions physically, socially, and psychologically whereas any increase in performance should be undertaken as a value added to the safety, comfort, and health of the end users.
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