Human performance engineering: A guide for system designers: R.W. Bailey Prentice-Hall International, pp 656 + xxiii, £34.20

✍ Scribed by Julia Scriven

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1984
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 99 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0003-6870
• DOI: 10.1016/0003-6870(84)90289-8

✦ Synopsis

This book aims to "provide designers, particularly those with a limited background in psychology, with some knowledge of how people sense, process information and respond: as well as to introduce data, principles and methods that are useful in eliciting an acceptable level of human performance in systems". In fact, readers with no background in psychology should be able to understand the text which is well thought out with some fairly complex concepts explained in everyday language. For example, in the introduction, the reader is gently guided through the distinctions between performance and behaviour and shown how psychologists measure some aspects of performance.

The worker is viewed as part of a system, not in isolation from his environment, but as a person, pursuine an activity in a context. Thus the main body of the text is organised into three sections, the Human, the Activity and the Context. The final part covers questionnaires, interviews. performance testing and a few simple statistical methods.

Books received

Curriculum guidelines for occupational safety and health in Australia

The Menzies Foundation, pp 217 +ix, £11.30.