Human Factors Discovered: Stories from the Front Lines

Recorded May 8, 2018

Randy has spent more than 3 decades thinking about how to improve human performance in complex, socio-technical systems. For most of that time, he was working with a system developer (Westinghouse or Boeing). That experience allowed him to be a witness to how human operators perform—what they do well and what happens that is different from what the system developer expected.

In this presentation, Randy will offer operational “stories” to illustrate how humans use technology in unanticipated ways and how system designers fail to understand how difficult system operation is. He will also discuss the dilemma of quantifying human performance. Larger Human Factors themes will emerge.