Posts Tagged ‘task taxonomies’
“What other taxonomies are necessary in HF and what methods are used?”
Article #13; (April 10, 2005)
The follow up question is: how can we conceive practical human error taxonomy before working taxonomies for the tasks required in a system? If the types and skills required by an operators to perform a set of tasks are not well defined and studied then, it is not that useful to apply a complex and general error taxonomy that does not delineate the applicable domain.
How can we allocate functions to either operators or machines, which means how can we decided who is better at performing a set of tasks an automated machine or a trained operator, if we cannot classify the human capabilities and limitations versus the potential capabilities and limitations of the machine we intend to design?
The current technology can automate the travel of airplanes from take off, to cruising and to landing without the need of a pilot. The obvious problem is who in his right mind would board an airplane without a certified pilot and a co-pilot?
It seems that in Japan, fast trains have no train pilot aboard but are controlled before reaching destinations. In this case, passengers are taking these trains but would rather be doubly secured by having trained pilots on board no matter the extremely high safety records of these automated trains.
Nowadays, most of these functions and task allocations are done by computer programs with the hope that an expert professional is going to take serious time to analyze the printouts and provide a judicious human feedback. These computer programs have, crossing our fingers, the necessary constraints on safety standards, health standards, serious errors restrictions and labor requirements for the least.
This is not a futile reasoning on who comes first, the error taxonomy or task taxonomy because the consequences are not that futile on operators, end users and the whole performance of systems.
When it comes to designing complex systems practical task and error taxonomies that delineate the domain of the operation and execution of a system is evident and time is of the essence.
In the next article I am going to let you have a hand at classifying methods by providing you with a list of various Human Factors methods. This list of methods is not necessarily randomized but thrown in without much order; otherwise it will not be an excellent exercise.
First, let us agree that a method is a procedure or a set of step by step process that our for runners of genius and scholars have tested, found it good, agreed on it on a consensus basis and offered it for you to use for the benefit of progress and science.
Many of you will still try hard to find short cuts to anything, including methods, for the petty argument that the best criterion to discriminating among clever people is who waste time on methods and whom are nerds.
Actually, the main reason I don’t try to teach new methods in this course is that students might smack run into a real occupational stress which they are not immune of.
Learning information in a thousand page course materials is one thing but having to use completely new methods as how to design, conduct and run experiments and statistically analyze data for a system behavior would be too much of a stress and diligent students might go overboard and straight to a mental rehabilitation institution.
What’s that concept of Human factors in Design? (Started these articles in 2003
What is this Human Factors profession?
Article number
1. “What is your job?”
2. “Sorry, you said Human Factors in Engineering?”
3. “So, you want systems to fit people?”
4. “The rights of the beast of burden; like a donkey?”
5. “Who could afford to hire Human Factors engineers?”
6. “In peace time, why and how often are Human Factors hired?
7. “What message should the Human Factors profession transmit?”
8. “What do you design again?”
9. “Besides displays and controls, what other interfaces do you design?”
10. “How Human Factors gets involved in the Safety and Health of end users?”
11. “What kind of methods will I have to manipulate and start worrying about?”
12. “What are the error taxonomies in Human Factors?”
13. “What are the task taxonomies and how basic are they in HF?”
14. “How useful are taxonomies of methods?”
15. “Are occupational safety and health standards and regulations of any concern for the HF professionals?”
16. “Are there any major cross over between HF and safety engineering?”
17. “Tell us about a few of your teaching methods and anecdotes”
18. “What this general course in Human Factors covers?”
19. “Could one general course in Human Factors make a dent in a career behavior?”
20. “How would you like to fit Human Factors in the engineering curriculum?”
21. “How to restructure engineering curriculum to respond to end users demands?”
22. “How can a class assimilate a course material of 1000 pages?”
23. “What undergraduate students care about university courses?”
24. “Students’ feedback on my teaching method”
25. “My pet project for undergraduate engineering curriculum”
26. “Guess what my job is”
27. “Do you know what your folk’s jobs are?”
28. “How do you perceive the inspection job to mean?”
29. “How objective and scientific is a research?”
30. “How objective and scientific are experiments?”
31. “A seminar on a multidisciplinary view of design”
32. “Consumer Product Liability Engineering”
33. “How could you tell long and good stories from HF graphs?”
34. “What message has the Human Factors profession been sending?”
35. “Who should be in charge of workspace design?”
36. “Efficiency of the human body structure and mind”
37. “Psycho-physical method”
38. “Human factors performance criteria”
39. “Fundamentals of controlled experimentation methods”
40. “Experimentation: natural sciences versus people’s behavior sciences”
41. “What do Human Factors measure?”
42. “New semester, new approach to teaching the course”
43. “Controlled experimentation versus Evaluation and Testing methods”
44. “Phases in the process of system/mission analyses”
45. “Main errors and mistakes in controlled experimentations”
46. “Human Factors versus Industrial, Computer, and traditional engineering”
47. “How Human Factors are considered at the NASA jet propulsion laboratory”
48. “Efficiency of the human cognitive power or mind”
49. “Human Factors versus Artificial Intelligence”
50. Computational Rationality in Artificial Intelligence
51. “Basic Engineering and Physics Problems Transformed Mathematically”
52. Mathematics: a unifying abstraction for Engineering and Physics
53. How to optimize human potentials in businesses for profit