Designing Effective Speech Interfaces

A Brief History

Human factors refers to taking the human being into account during design.

In a sense, as long as humans have been interacting with their environment there have been human factors considerations. Given the shape, arrangement, and working characteristics of our hands and thumbs, for example, what is the best size and shape stick to use when we want to hit a tree to make the fruit come off? So much of the early human factors “work” was probably not done consciously, and certainly was not called “human factors.”

Now a growing group of designers are interested in taking human factors into account. There are hundreds of human characteristics that have been researched, studied, and catalogued, for example, height, weight, size of hands, reaction times on specific tasks, memory, visual perception, sound detection. The list is extensive, and large manuals—for instance, the 2137-page book by Salvendy (1997)—describe these known characteristics in detail.

It is hard to pinpoint when the field of human factors officially began. We have hinted at placing the date somewhere back in our cave days, but most people in the field point to World War II as a pivotal point. Before that, during the early 1900s, there was some research on designing work areas to improve performance and minimize fatigue. But it was during World War II that psychologists and engineers started working together to design equipment that would be easier for humans to learn and use. Expensive and deadly errors ...