Human factors (also called ergonomics) is the study of how people actually perform within systems — physically, perceptually, and cognitively — and how equipment, displays, software, and work processes should be shaped around those human capabilities and limits. In this topic we look at both halves of the field: the physical dimension (posture, reach, repetitive strain, workstation layout) and the cognitive dimension (attention, memory load, situational awareness, decision making). Both matter to interface design, because an interface is never used in isolation; it sits inside a task, a workstation, and a work system.
The topic also covers automation: what happens when part of a task is handed off to a machine or algorithm. Automation rarely removes work — it changes it, often shifting the human into a monitoring role, which can degrade situational awareness, create new error modes, and leave people out of the loop when something goes wrong. Display design principles (making relevant information visible, grouping it sensibly, matching it to the operator's mental model) are the main lever designers have for keeping people informed and in control.
While watching the two videos below, keep two questions in mind. First, what is the limiting factor in the scenario being described — the body, the senses, attention, or memory? Second, what design or work-system change would relieve that limit, and what new problem might that change introduce? That trade-off thinking is the core habit of human factors work.
A short workplace-safety style introduction to ergonomics, focused on body mechanics, posture, lifting, and workstation setup as ways to prevent injury. Based on its title and description, it covers practical, everyday ergonomic adjustments rather than theory, and frames ergonomics as fitting the task and equipment to the worker.
It gives a concise, concrete entry point to the physical dimension of ergonomics from a safety-training producer, which grounds the abstract idea of 'fitting the system to the human' before we extend that same logic to cognitive and interface concerns.
A TED talk by researcher Advait Sarkar arguing that offloading reasoning to AI chatbots can speed up work while quietly eroding the user's own critical thinking. Expect discussion of what is gained and lost when a cognitive task is automated, and how people's engagement with a task changes when a tool does part of the thinking.
It is a current, well-produced treatment of automation's effect on the human operator — complacency, loss of engagement, and out-of-the-loop effects — which maps directly onto the automation, human error, mental workload, and situational awareness subtopics.
These videos support the module outcomes by supplying the human-performance context the outcomes assume. The AI talk illustrates how a user's expectations about a system's competence can diverge from what it actually does, which is exactly the mental-model mismatch that produces systematic errors (MO2), and its discussion of cognitive offloading connects to memory and attention limits that constrain interface design (MO1). The ergonomics video reinforces task- and workstation-level thinking that feeds into decomposing goals into subtasks and evaluating designs in realistic use contexts (MO3, MO4). Together they give you criteria — physical fit, workload, error potential, and retained user control — to justify choices when you build and critique a prototype (MO5).
These videos were chosen from YouTube on October 3, 2026. Each has captions; the player turns them on. Videos on YouTube can be changed or removed — if one no longer plays, tell your instructor. If a player does not appear, use its Watch on YouTube link.