Human Factors Engineering

Whether it is the car you drive or the app on your smartphone, technology has an increasing influence on you. When designed with people in mind, this in influence can improve lives and productivity. This book provides a broad introduction on how to attend to the needs, capabilities, and preferences of people. We combine design thinking and systems thinking to understand people’s needs and evaluate whether those needs are met.

This book describes the capabilities and limits of people—both mental and physical—and how these can guide the design of everything from typography to teams and from data visualization to habits. The book includes:

  • Over 70 design principles for displays, controls, human-computer interaction, automation, and workspace layout
  • Integrative discussion of the research and theory underlying these principles, supported by over 1,000 references
  • Examples of successful and unsuccessful designs that link principles and theory to applications in consumer products, the workplace, and high risk- systems
  • For instructors teaching user experience and human factors courses we have created a Facebook group to share teaching materials and suggestions

We include a small sample of examples organized around the topics of the book here.

This is the third edition of An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering (Wickens, Lee, Liu, Gordon-Becker, 2003) textbook, written by an experienced team of authors. It shows how psychology students can apply their knowledge to design and engineering. It also shows designers and engineers how to consider the capabilities and limits of people in design.

This book takes provides an overview of the human factors engineering discipline. We define human factors engineering as the consideration of the cognitive, physical, and organizational influences on human behavior to improve products and processes. This broad definition overlaps with related fields of user experience design and human-computer interaction.

The first chapter of the book is available on ResearchGate and the full book on Barnes and Noble or Amazon.