Summary
The key industry challenge is designing complex systems that are safe, intuitive, and error-tolerant while still meeting operational demands—ensuring humans can effectively understand, interact with, and make decisions within them.
The course addresses the challenge by guiding participants through a complete Human Factors approach: it helps them recognise design issues, assess the level of Human Factors input needed, apply key methods and activities, and produce an integration plan. Learning is reinforced through real-world examples, case studies, and self-assessment exercises, ensuring systems are intuitive, error-tolerant, and aligned with user needs.
Good Human Factors starts with designing systems to be intuitive, easy to operate, meet user needs and error tolerant. Usability and user acceptance is essential. This requires; a user centred approach to design, understanding users and their tasks; applying Human Factors design standards and principles; user testing; and learning from past systems. Systems should keep people “in the loop”, so that they understand what is happening and can make good decisions.
This course takes you through an A-Z pathway for applying Human Factors to design and engineering. It starts by exemplifying Human Factors design issues to help you recognise these in your work.
It moves on to:
1) Screening design projects and determining the level of Human Factors input needed
2) Understanding and being able to identify key Human Factors methods and activities and
3) Producing a Human Factors Integration plan.
This course uses real design and equipment examples, self-assessment exercises and case studies to enable learning from practice.
The course is taught by a Chartered Human Factors specialist with experience of oil, gas, chemicals, transport and nuclear sectors.
Who should attend?
This course is intended for anyone engaged in design and engineering of systems operated and maintained by people, especially of safety critical engineered systems – such as control rooms, controls and instrumentation, field engineering, interfaces, workstations and workspaces. No previous Human Factors training is required, but attendance on the one-day Human factors in engineering systems: Introduction is desirable.
How will I benefit?
After the course, you will:
- Recognise Human Factors issues in system design
- Assess the level of Human Factors input required for projects
- Understand key Human Factors methods and activities
- Produce a Human Factors integration plan
- Understand how to design intuitive, user-friendly, and error-tolerant systems
- Improve capability to keep operators “in the loop” for better decision-making
- Gain practical experience through case studies, examples, and self-assessment exercises