Incorporating Human Factors into an Engineering Process

Within the field of engineering there is a commonly used model to develop products, which comprises the following steps: identify or be informed of a problem, investigate technologies that can be used to overcome the problem, develop a design concept, identify design requirements, develop a design and prototype, refine the technology, test the technology, prepare for mass production, and then test for scalability. This process can be seen below

The human factors approach is similar, but it incorporates four additional stages: understanding user needs, designing the product, testing and refining the product, and then testing in the wild when possible.

Incorporating the human factors approach with the engineering development model generates the following process model. This allows us to identify when in the engineering process the human factors methods and evaluations are best undertaken.