2-5 Why Integrate Human Factors?

Industry Experience with the Value of Early Integration of HF in Design. In addition to FAA requirements that HF considerations should be addressed as early as practical to minimize technical, programmatic, and operational risk (AMS Policy 4.7), input from experienced program managers and human factors practitioners in industry has indicated the following:

• “If you wait to do it at the back end, it’s super expensive to fix HF problems. You need to catch problems while it’s easy to fix them.”
• “You can’t redo the project when you find the HF problems too late. They put on band-aids like a tip sheet with lots of things in fine print and recommend the real changes be delayed until Version 2 or Version 3. That creates resistance to the use of a product and increases its potential for failure.”
• “We had one major project where the engineering lead reached out to the HF professional for feedback too late and then decided to leave the recommended changes for future revisions. The project failed because there were too many usability challenges.”
  
• “Some project managers and development staff think that everyone knows human factors: 
  ‘I’m human so I know what people need’. Of course, they don’t really have the understanding that can be provided by a HF expert. But they may just cherry pick to decide when to ask a HF expert for input, or they may not involve the HF expert at all. Cherry picking doesn’t work well.”