When Human Factors Fails: Intentional and Unintentional Bad Designs

Abstract

The primary goal of human factors is to create systems that can be easily used by their intended audience, while minimizing the number of mistakes that a user might make. However, sometimes human factors principles are applied in ways that makes a user’s task harder. Sometimes this is intentional, and the designer uses human factors as justification for creating an exclusionary design. In other cases, it is unintentional, and the application of human factors was done in a haphazard or incomplete way, with the resulting design at cross-purposes with the original intent. In either case, that’s bad human factors.