This page contains short descriptions and examples for each type of Human Factors methods. To skip to a specific method, select it on the Table of Contents. To find out more about each method, click the title of the method or the link to go to that method's page!
The "Design Cycle" is how researchers describe the design process for products and research studies. Knowing where in the design cycle a project currently is can help researchers and developers understand which ergonomic performance assessment methods are best used for their research question.
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We use task analysis to observe users and document their actions in detail. Knowing how a user completes a task can help inform the design of products and services.
A hierarchical task analysis (HTA) is an analytical method that elaborates on the descriptive information gathered about a task. An HTA breaks down the goals of a task into subgoals and task components.
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User needs analysis is a method that goes into depth about the needs of the end user for a given product or interface. After all, you cannot design a product for a target audience if you do not know what they need.
A common method used for user needs analysis is known as a focus group. Basically, you take a small group from the target population and ask them a set of questions with followups to help you design or improve a product for them.
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When we interact with objects and environments, we gather knowledge that form mental representations. We refer to these internal representations of what we interact with in the external world as mental models.
A common method that we utilize is called the think aloud method. To conduct this method, a researcher would recruit representative users and ask them to continuously think out loud by encouraging them to verbalize their thoughts and actions while completing a specific task within a system.
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Errors can be classified into two main categories: slips (right intent, wrong action) and mistakes (wrong intent)
At each step of a hierarchical task analysis, we can assess the probability an error will occur, the consequence of an error occurring, and how critical it would be if an error did occur. Conducting a HTA and assessing which errors can occur at each step can be very beneficial, and should occur iteratively through a design process.
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In a team, team members have specific roles that vary on the individual level. Team members depend on eachother to perform a specific task. Team members bring different knowledge, skills, and abilities to a task.
We can assess team members mental models to get a collective view of team cognition. A method to use here would be to give team members a factual test of taskwork knowledge. If we gather this information by testing all team members, we can combine them and have qualitative data on the teams mental model.
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Situation awareness is more or less what it sounds like: awareness of what is going on around you while performing a given task. While often talked about in military application, this can be used in video games, driving, and various jobs that require a high level of awareness.
Two popular methods to study are the retroactive interview, where you ask participants to recall positions of people and simultaneously occurring activities from a past event, or the SAGAT, which is a technique that involves stopping participants mid-task to ask them questions about what is going on around them.
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Workload refers to the cognitive effort required to complete a task. This is relevant to just about every task, everything from navigating a website to make a purchase, to being an air traffic controller.
One of the most popular methods to measure workload is the NASA-TLX, which is a questionnaire that asks participants to rate on a 7-point scale questions such as "how mentally demanding was the task", as well as card sorting, which involves pairing the different dimensions of the scale and determining which one was more important (e.g. performance vs. effort).
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Naturalistic decision-making (NDM) is a study of how people use previous experience to make decisions in real-world contexts. There are 4 essential characteristics of NDM: process orientation, situation-action matching decision rules, context-bound informal modeling, and empirical-based prescription.
A researcher wants to know how an expert firefighter would handle certain stressful situations. The researcher asks the firefighter about these situations and asks what they would do, and then takes note of their responses. Afterwards, this expert knowledge can be used to train future firefighters on how to face the same stressful situations!
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Usability is a broad term that describes research on how effectively, efficiently, and satisfyingly a product or system can be used. Usability research can span from broad testing for functionality ("does it work as intended?") to the more focused universal usability research ("can users with specific needs use our product?").
A library wants to test if their new website is accessible to people with visual impairment. They contact usability experts to conduct research, who find participants with visual impairments to test functionalities on the website. They find that the color contrast on the website is too low for certain visual impairments to be able to properly distinguish the buttons, so they inform the library about the issues that need to be fixed.
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User Experience (UX) is a specific aspect of usability research that looks at how users interact with products and how it makes them feel about said products.
A group of researchers have been contacted by the developers of a new video game to test out what needs to be fixed before the game launches. The researchers bring in a variety of people to play the game and ask them questions about their experience with it, like if they could see themselves buying the game, if anything was frustrating about the layout of certain menus, and such. The researchers then gave the developers a report on fixes to implement before the game officially launches.
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