Book Review: The Human Factor

Sholom Sandalow, Wednesday, January 31, 2007 @ 2:56 pm

Studying how people interact with technology should play an important role in the software design process.  A program that is built without an understanding of how it’s users interact with the device it runs on is likely doomed to fail.  But prioritizing human factors is not only important in software design.  It can also save lives, according to “The Human Factor”, by Kim Vicente.

The book makes clear, with some intriguing stats, as well as real life horror stories, that the lack of priority placed on understanding human factors carries drastic and sometimes fatal consequences.
We as a society come to rely on sophisticated technology more and more every day, not just for entertainment purposes, but for basic living needs.  But surprisingly little time or money is devoted to understanding how we interact with the technology around us.  So as it becomes more sophisticated, the products and systems that use it-- products that are critical to our everyday lives--are growing more complex and less usable.  According to Vicente, if we don’t do something about it soon, the result is a situation that endangers each and every one of us.

Much of the book is devoted to the problems that plague three industries that are vital to our health as a society, and could potentially cause the most harm: health care, air transportation and energy generation.  Mr Vicente peeks behind the curtains of these industries to show us why human factors gets neglected, what the consequences are, and what can be done about it.
He observes that human factors study is sorely lacking at both the system and the manufacturing levels, infecting not just products, but organizations as well.

In the case of health care, as aversion to understanding how its professionals interact with technology seems to be pervasive and ingrained.  As a result, medical products suffer from seriously flawed design, and are frequently counter-intuitive to use.  The health care system as a whole is also designed poorly. Harsh scheduling results in doctors who are overworked and understaffed, and flawed error recovery policies mean mistakes are repeated over and over again.  When mistakes occur on operational products, it is usually ascribed to human error, even though it is the confusing technology that is frequently at fault.   It’s not surprising that over 90,000 preventable deaths occur each year in us hospitals.

Health care is not the only industry in which a lack of attention to human factors has potentially fatal consequences.  Nuclear power plants are among the most complicated pieces of technology in the world.  The number of systems running/data points needing to be monitored/factors needing to be controlled is staggering.  The design of nuclear control rooms desperately needs an infusion of some human factors thinking or the consequences could be devastating.  The first pages of the book describe the Chernobyl disaster from inside the control room, and it quickly becomes clear that had it been designed with its users capabilities in mind, the result would have been far less damaging.  Vicente advocates the need to learn from Chernobyl (and Three Mile Island, among others) to design control rooms that make sense to their operators.

The airline industry is yet another example of the potential harm that a lack of human factors study can have, Neither the systems that pilots work within, or the airplanes they fly are designed with their capabilities and constraints in mind.  Pilot schedules are notoriously harsh, causing in flight fatigue.  And current cockpits seem to be designed to cause the maximum amount of confusion.  Like in healthcare, human error is frequently blamed when the real culprit is operational, but unusable, technology.  The resulting risk in air transportation is sobering; reminding us how important human factors is.

Vicente persuasively demonstrated how critical it is that we prioritize human factors study, and what the consequences may be if we don’t.  Although I don’t work on anything that has the potential to do as much harm as that of an airplane or a nuclear power plant, I came away with a better understanding of the value of human factors study.

user experience design

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