Ergonomics 

What is Ergonomics?

• If you get into a strange car, do you find the important controls ready to hand where you expect them, and feel confident that you can drive safely? That is because the car designer got the ergonomics right.

• If you have an all singing, all dancing gizmo like a video recorder, do you have to fiddle around trying to work out how to make it do what you want, and then end up recording the wrong thing? That is because the gizmo designer got the ergonomics wrong.

Ergonomics is the study of people in their working environment. The word comes from the Greek: Ergon =Work + Nomos = Natural law. But studying the problem only takes you half way, so in practice, ergonomics is about improving the fit between people and their 'working' environment. Or at least that was the original idea, but we now live in such a technology rich environment, so ergonomics has to cover a lot more than when we are ’working’.

The human body and mind took hundreds of thousands of years to evolve, and we can't change them very easily. In contrast, technological products are designed and created much more quickly. So you would expect people to design them around the needs and limitations of their human users. But they don't always. Some products are designed with users and their tasks in mind, and they are very easy to use. Sadly many products aren’t. Whose fault is it?

• Partly the designers for focusing on the technology rather than the people who use it

• Partly the managers (because getting the human aspects right means spending more time and money up-front)

• Partly the customers, who buy things with features they will never use, which make the products too complicated

• Partly the customers (again) who buy products without a ’test drive’ to make sure they are easy to use.

• Partly the users, who don't complain when confusing controls lead to mistakes, because they blame themselves instead of the product.

Ergonomics provides the knowledge and the techniques to get things right, but those involved with creating the product need to make use of that knowledge, and those of us who use the products need to raise our expectations, so that manufacturers take notice. Products don't have to be hard to use, if they are designed properly.

See for yourself

The world is full of examples of good and bad ergonomics. Many are so obvious that even a non expert can learn to spot some of them.

• If you find something very easy and intuitive to use, ask yourself what the designer did to make it easy.

• If you find something confusing, or you find yourself making slips or mistakes, look critically at whatever you are using and think how things could have been better designed to avoid the problems.

But designers don’t deliberately make things hard to use. Often they were trying to do something else, which they felt was a good idea – what makes designers excited isn't always the same thing that makes a product easy to use. When you meet a design that doesn’t work for you, it can be fascinating to try to work out what the designer was trying to achieve.

To err is human

As humans, we are inherently error prone, but well designed products and systems make it easier to avoid the errors, and also easier to spot and correct them when they do occur. Alphonse Chapanis once paraphrased the old saying as: "To err is human, to forgive design".

Some interesting facts (circa 1999)

• Work related sickness cost UK employers and tax payers £11,000M pa.

• Half of the sick leave of ambulance workers related to injuries while lifting.

• Four out of five mobile phone users never used any facilities other than dialling numbers by hand, despite buying phones equipped with all the facilities that they found too difficult to use. (This was before mobile phones became fashion items for the young!)

• On average two buggies were bought per baby born in the UK. It was thought that the second was bought to overcome the usability problems that were not foreseen with the first.

• Human factors are implicated in most aircraft accidents. The majority of civil aircraft that crash are functioning normally when they hit the ground.

There's nowt so queer as folk

One of the things you come to appreciate as an ergonomist is the truth of this old saying. It even applies to what we call ourselves. In some industries 'Ergonomics' dominates and in others 'Human Factors'. Even worse, in industries like transport and defence, where 'Human Factors' is the prevailing term for the overall discipline, some people think of ergonomics as being restricted to the physical aspects of how people interact with controls, seating, and so on. It doesn't help that the discipline has such a broad span, embracing everything from bio-mechanics and musculo-skeletal disorders at one end to cognitive processes and social structures at the other. Human beings are very complex, so it isn't surprising that Human Factors (or Ergonomics) is such a broad discipline.

In 2009, The Ergonomics Society, which had been formed 60 years earlier in 1949, acknowledged this diversity by renaming itself the Institute of Ergonomics and Human Factors (IEHF) .

To find out more about Ergonomics

For very good introductions to ergonomics, look at What is Ergonomics or at ergonomics4schools  .

The Institute of Ergonomics & Human Factors  is the UK professional body of ergonomists.

I work for Hu-Tech , an ergonomics consultancy.

See also my talk about ergonomics . 

Copyright © 1999 - 2005 John Harrison