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IWC Special Issue in Human Factors and Interaction Design for Critical Systems

The study of Human Factors (HF) and Interaction Design (ID) plays a central role in critical systems design. HF discovers and applies information about human behaviour, abilities, limitations and other characteristics to the design of tools, machines, systems, tasks, jobs and environments, for productive, safe, comfortable and effective human use. Successful ID is inherently multidisciplinary, forward looking, and aims to sketch, synthesise and prototype the future. Although the two fields are closely related, there are critical differences in approaches. Interaction designers typically seek to shape, create and explore future solutions, whereas HF researchers seek to operationalize social, psychological and behavioural theory to optimize design, often with constraints, such as error-free interaction, generally for skilled workers. HF work has a long tradition in the workplace, often concerned with dangerous and critical activities performed by skilled operators, whereas ID is increasingly focused on the huge market of discretionary consumers, often concerned with the likes and dislikes of people. When focused on common problems, however, HF and ID should be complementary, but also there is a need to understand how best to achieve this. In the worst case, designers make things that are just attractive (increasing profit, which marketing likes), whereas human factors experts make things that are just reliable (decreasing risk). We need both, and a wider perspective than ‘just’! These two forces seem to be splitting HCI. HCI it is either UX and fun or technical and industrial. The dominance of social media and consumer products makes UX seem ‘natural’ to many, but it may be inappropriate or misleading in critical applications. Our heritage of thinking in HCI, such as the Nielsen/Shneiderman guidelines, was established before this split became apparent. This special issue of Interacting with Computers focuses on the relation, tensions and trade-offs between HF and ID specifically in healthcare domains, aiming to effectively support design practice and research by showcasing the use of human factors/studies of human performance during the design, evaluation and use of interactive devices (e.g. findings relating to human error, cognitive performance and perceptual-motor control). We selected five papers for this special issue after a rigorous peer review process, as well as hosting an international workshop, the International Symposium on Interaction Design and Human Factors, in 2014 that we held in Kochi, Japan (see http://idhf.xrenlab.com) where many of the papers now in this issue were presented and exposed to critical discussion. The paper by Xiaojuan Ma investigated user ability of comprehending pictorial representations of medical conditions and accordingly proposed design guidelines for a visual vocabulary of electronic medical information to improve health literacy. The paper by Grace Begany et al. analysed human factors affecting user perception of search interfaces (e.g. in medical systems) through voice and touch gesture input and textual input, such as familiarity with the interface. Based on the understanding of human motor control ability of interacting with large displays, Kibum Kim et al. proposed a novel technique to aid elder people in remote target selection on large touch screens. Aiming to reduce number transcription errors in medical device interaction, Huawei Tu et al. explored user