Designing for People: An introduction to human factors engineering

by John D. Lee, Christopher D. Wickens, Yili Liu

Whether it is the car you drive or the app on your smartphone, technology has an increasingly powerful influence on you. When designed with people in mind, this in influence can improve lives and productivity. This book provides a broad introduction on how to attend to the needs, capabilities, and preferences of people in the design process. We combine methods of design thinking and systems thinking to understand people’s needs and evaluate whether those needs are met.

This book also provides a detailed description of the capabilities and limits of people—both mental and physical—and how these can guide the design of everything from typography to teams and from data visualization to habits. The book includes:

Over 70 design principles for displays, controls, human-computer interaction, automation, and workspace layout
Integrative discussion of the research and theory underlying these guidelines, supported by over 1,000 references
Examples of successful and unsuccessful designs and exercises that link principles and theory to applications in consumer products, the workplace, and high risk- systems
For instructors teaching user experience and human factors courses we have created a Facebook group to share teaching materials and suggestions
This is the third edition of An Introduction to Human Factors Engineering (Wickens, Lee, Liu, Gordon-Becker, 2003) textbook. It shows how psychology students can apply their knowledge to design and engineering. It also shows designers and engineers how to consider the capabilities and limits of people in design.

Genres: Design

692 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2003

Reviews

[Romy Hoppen · Rating 1 out of 5]

“This book provides a broad introduction on how to attend to the needs, capabilities and preferences of people in de design process.” Well ... none of the interesting things in de book are implemented in the layout of the text. My level of arousal was so to say incredibly low! It is just really sad that a book full of methods to gain the appropriate attention does literally nothing to help gaining that information.

[Meg · Rating 5 out of 5]

Incredibly in-depth guide to designing with real human beings in mind. If you are assigned this book as part of a human factors course as I was, don't just skim through it and hang on to it after the course to use as a reference. It's a master class in engineering systems using the principles of human psychology. Be prepared for at least one formula featuring double integrals that I'm not convinced was entirely necessary to include.

[Alex Holder · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just a terribly edited, poorly written mess of a text book. The book itself goes against many of the human factors principles it espouses. The text is set too narrow and close to the fold. Genuinely increases the difficulty of the material because of all the typos and misspellings. Avoid if you can.

[Griffin Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The better of the two human factors engineering textbooks that I have read