Including Human Factors and Ergonomics in Requirements Engineering for Digital Work Environments

Digital technology plays an important role in our work places, and much time is spent in the virtual environments that technology provides. However, today’s digital work environments are often cumbersome and hard to use, and contribute to stress and ill-health with subsequent cost to the individual, to their employers and to society. Our long-term aim is to facilitate the development of IT systems that provide a healthy digital work environment by including a human factors and ergonomics (HFE) perspective in the requirements engineering (RE) process. IT systems can then be better adapted to professional users, rather than forcing them to adapt work processes to the tools provided. As a first step, we performed an exploratory case study of a recently implemented IT system at a major Nordic bank to identify relevant aspects of HFE to consider within RE. The study consisted of a literature review, observations and interviews. We present eight factors covering user support such as documentation and training, and system characteristics such as understandability, ease of learning, ease of remembering, user satisfaction, system interplay and work-process interplay. These initial results may support non-HFE experts in including these aspects in RE for digital work environments. The results are also a starting point for further research into incorporating HFE in RE.