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 that 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. Technological products are designed and created much more quickly. You might expect people to design them around the needs and limitations of their human users. Products designed with their users' tasks in mind are easy to use, but sadly many products aren’t.

Whose fault is it?

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

• Partly it is the managers, for not spending the money up-front that is needed to get the human aspects right.

• Partly it is the customers, who buy things with features that they will never use, which encourages designers to make the products over complicated with too little attention to ensuring that users will be able to understand them.

• Partly it is the customers (again) who buy products without giving them a ’test drive’ to make sure that they will find them easy to use.

• Partly it is the users, who don't complain when confusing controls lead to mistakes, and then blame themselves instead of the blaming the product.

Ergonomics provides the knowledge and the techniques to get things right, but it can only do so if those involved with creating the product make use of that knowledge. Those of us who use the products need to raise our expectations if we expect manufacturers take notice. Products don't have to be hard to use. They can be designed properly. But if we buy poorly designed products and don't complain, then there is little incentive for anyone to design them properly.

Most people only think of ergonomics as being related to things like keyboards and office chairs, or maybe to the design of hand tools, but ergonomics has much broader application. At one end of the scale there are experts in bio-mechanics, concerned with how the body responds to the demands put on it, whether the body is sitting in an office or in a jet fighter, lifting parcels or lifting patients, or performing extreme sports. At the other end of the scale, there are experts in organisational psychology concerned with how people interact with each other, and how things like leadership and safety culture affect their behaviour and the organisation's performance. In between are experts in a lot of other things like equipment design, work and task design, teamwork and procedures, and there are specialists with expertise in areas like human performance, cognitive processes, human error and human reliability. What they all share in common is a concern for how people interact with, and are affected by, the rest of the complex systems of which they find themselves being a part.

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 them.

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

• If you find something confusing, or you find yourself making slips and mistakes, look critically at whatever it is and think how things could have been better designed to make it easier for you.

Designers don’t deliberately make things hard to use. They usually want to make the product better, but they might have been trying to do something else, which you might not need but which seemed a good idea to them. Things that make designers excited aren't always the things that will make a product easy for you to use. So when you meet a design that doesn’t work for you, try to work out what the designer was really trying to achieve – it can be a fascinating guessing game.

To err is human

As humans, we are inherently error prone. It's a by product of the way our minds are organised to help us make sense of the world around us and survive. But well designed products and systems make it easier for us to avoid making errors, and also easier to spot and correct errors 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 when buying 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) .

Good and bad examples

 You don't need to be an expert to find good examples of ergonomics in everyday objects, as well as designs which clearly ignored ergonomics. See Everyday ergonomics .

A 'car park from hell'

This was a very public saga of poor ergonomics that ran for many years before I took a serious interest in it and tried to get things changed. Read all about it .

Why lorries smashed my fence

This also went on for many years. I identified the main causes and tried to get things changed. Read all about it 

Find out more

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 . 

The HSE has guidance about many aspects of ergonomics in industrial workplaces .

There are some graphic descriptions of Six Disasters Caused by Poorly Designed User Interfaces 

Copyright © 1999 - 2022 John Harrison