Ergonomics in Design: The Quarterly of Human Factors Applications

This article describes a case study I use as a hands-on design assignment in a human factors psychology course. The assignment is to redesign an exit sign, taking into account principles of visual display design and environmental factors that could reduce the sign's visibility. Assigning a particular object to redesign allows in-class comparison and discussion, and it is relatively easy for students when they begin to identify human factors deficiencies in everyday objects. Students consistently rate this assignment positively, and they especially enjoy its creative aspects.

Organizations' increasing use of virtual teams has emphasized the importance of effective virtual team leadership. Yet the distribution of team members complicates typical leader functions, such as supervision and support, which the leader must now perform through technology. In this article, we present 10 strategies for managing virtual teams, focusing on the role of technology and training. Our hope is that these strategies will inform designers and guide them in developing collaborative support tools and procedures for these tools and in designing training for the use of these tools.

Over the last 25 years, considerable research has been conducted in an effort to understand human behavior in automated systems. These efforts have yielded a number of valuable findings about the overall nature of human-automation interaction across a wide range of domains, such as aviation, surface transportation, medical systems, manufacturing environments, and maritime vehicles. In this article, we provide an overview of another domain that has been heavily influenced by automation: agricultural vehicles. We share some observations about the impacts of automation on human behavior within this domain, discuss some of the tools and methods being used to investigate these issues, and speculate about the lessons to be learned about human-automation interaction from this arena.

Physician sign-out is a mechanism for transferring patient information from one group of hospital care-givers to another at shift changes. Support tools are critical to the success of sign-out. To ensure that a tool is effective, designers must collaborate with end users, but collaboration can be difficult when working with users who are busy and have irregular schedules. In this article, we report on a collaborative effort between physicians and engineers to redesign a sign-out support tool. Strategies included focus groups, interviews, “on-the-fly” feedback, and an iterative design process, which engaged end users in the design process. Task analysis methods enabled us to quantify the differences in functionality between the original tool and the prototype.

In this column, William F. Moroney reports on ergonomics issues that have appeared in the press. Contributions are invited. Please send electronic copy with references to moroney@udayton.edu.