Early identification of Human Factors issues in concept development - the Human Factors Impact Assessment Tool (HFITT)

Download HFI and Emerging Technologies report

Download Annex to HFI and Emerging Technologies report

What is this report about?
For Human Factors (HF) to be integrated effectively it has to be considered at the earliest possible opportunity in the design / procurement process. This document describes a tool for classifying the likely HF issues associated with an emerging technology. The tool is for use by designers and those involved in procurements in the earliest stages of a project and aims to flag HF issues at the earliest stages of a concept's development. The main purpose of the tool is to enable an appreciation of HF issues and thereby provide a means to estimate and scope the likely HF effort required to address those issues.

What problem does the report address?
The development of the tool has arisen from the findings of a review carried out under a Work Package to examine the HFI impact of emerging technologies, which identified an approach to bring together the technical and HF aspects of system design more closely. Specifically, the recommendations suggested that the effectiveness of new acquisitions could be improved if a more integrated approach were taken to HF issues in design.

What is the benefit of this work?
The Human Factors Impact Assessment Tool (HFITT) was conceived as a method for classifying the likely HF issues associated with a nascent technology. In use, the tool should allow a non-specialist user to rapidly discover which human factors (HF) issues will be most salient in the procurement and use of a new technology. The HFITT is also equally applicable to the development of systems and equipment that use existing technologies.

The tool will require the user to answer questions about the types of operations the user will perform, the functions the system will perform and the context of use. The answers to these questions will determine the weighting given to each of the HF issue types identified in the MOD's “ Practical Guidance to IPTs” document The output of the tool will be a report indicating the relative importance of each of the domain /sub-domains, which can ultimately be used to guide the scoping of HF risk, and as input to further HF analyses.

Who should take note of it?

• DPA IPT personnel (particularly HFI Foci)
• MoD Industry Group and similar HF committees
• HF practitioners
• Service Principal Personnel Officers

What is the report's status?
The report is at Issue 1 and will not be subsequently amended.

What are the main issues addressed in the report?
A major motivation for the development of the HFITT was to bridge the gap between the development of new technology and the formal assessment of HF impact. Currently, a technology item that reaches the Concept phase of the CADMID procurement process may or may not have had specific HF input into its design. This is often due to a lack of communication (or availability of information) between engineers, designers, and HF specialists.

What are the findings?
The document discusses the approach taken to the design and implementation of the HFITT, the tool's relationship with existing Human Factors Integration (HFI) procedures and makes practical recommendations for the deployment of the tool. The potential for the further development of the HFITT is also addressed. The appendices to the report give further information on the structure of the tool and screen shots.

What is recommended?
In its present form HFITT embodies the opinion of a small group of analysts within the HFI DTC . A clear next step would therefore be to canvas the opinion of the intended users (IPTs, requirements managers, engineers, and designers) to ensure that the tool is developing in a way that is usable and that provides useful information. This is currently being planned. In general it is expected that HFITT will be subject to change on the basis of feedback from users. A slightly more involved form of future development would involve checking the validity of the dimensions and items used in the present version of the HFITT using multidimensional scaling techniques.

So what?
The tool is aimed primarily at the non-specialist user, and provides them with a brief introduction to the concept of HF issues in a given procurement. The tool also provides the HF specialist with a broad description of the equipment and will provide a framework around which the Early Human Factors Analysis (EHFA) can be developed. As such HFITT provides a potentially powerful tool to aid the investigation of technology-related HFI issues early in the system design lifecycle.

Why bother?
HFITT Supports IPTs and others in addressing the difficult questions of “How much HF is involved?” and “How much will it cost to address HFI?”