ABSTRACT
Human Factors and User Experience design have developed relatively independently and from different traditions and yet they both share the all important goal of making better things for people to use. Human Factors pre-dates computer systems and grew from industrial engineering and psychology, with a focus on large socio-technical systems, whereas user experience design has grown from interaction design with an emphasis on internet experiences and e-commerce. At GE (and elsewhere) these worlds are colliding, as the consumeriation of IT brings mobile devices and expectations of consumer-level simplicity to industrial work environments. Which leads to a key question – what is the relationship between human factors and user experience design? How do they work together? What do they each contribute to the other? In this talk, I intend to explore these questions through looking at a variety of projects I’ve been involved with, or close to, over the past 30 years.
