Human Factors
How people decide, fail, and recover. The cognitive and physiological mechanics that determine whether a well-designed system actually performs.
Core principle: When a human fails in a system, the first question is not “why did the person make that mistake?” but “what about the system made that mistake predictable?” Human limits are design inputs, not problems to manage.
Modules
| Module | Focus | Pages |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Foundations | What is human factors, cognitive architecture, situation awareness | 3 |
| 2. Performance | Cognitive load, fatigue and performance, handoff degradation, shift work | 4 |
| 3. Signal Detection | Alert fatigue, expert recognition, signal detection theory | 3 |
| 4. Decision Science | Debiasing, escalation and sunk cost, heuristics and biases, loss aversion | 4 |
| 5. Error Systems | Error taxonomy, handoff failure, resilience engineering, Swiss cheese model | 4 |
| 6. Product Design | Alert design, cognitive load in UI, human-in-the-loop, trust calibration | 4 |
| 7. Team Dynamics | Communication failures, high reliability orgs, psychological safety, team cognition | 4 |
| 8. Adversarial | Adversarial design, detection workflows, fraud patterns, incentive gaming | 4 |
Integration Points
- Operations Research — High utilization systems degrade human performance; the same curve that produces long waits produces clinician overload
- Workforce — Fatigue, burnout, and role design are shared concerns between human factors and workforce mechanics
- Emergent Systems — Agent-based models share structural DNA with human factors models of team coordination under stress