What is Human Factors?

When I mention my field, people rarely know what I mean. Human Factors? Is that like human resources? Is it I/O psychology? The goal of this page is to help explain what we actually do in this fascinating, relevant, poorly-named discipline.

Here are a few pithy ways I've heard the field described:

• Human Factors uses what we know about cognitive psychology (memory, attention, etc.) to design better systems. (Tyler Shaw)
• Unlike some aspects of psychology where if you get it wrong, people might feel bad, if we (Human Factors engineers) get it wrong, people get dead. (Deak Helton)
• Human Factors aims to optimize the relationship between humans and technology.

Essentially, Human Factors (HF) is a combination of psychology and engineering. At times, HF people may do work that falls entirely in one field or the other, but they mostly work with both. It's all about design: how to create objects, systems, and places that interact well with human users. In practice, this ranges from making the shape of doors clearly indicate whether you should push or pull to designing partly autonomous cars that keep your attention on the road in case you need to take over control. Some related fields that can be indistinguishable from HF include Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), Ergonomics, and Work Psychology.