From the ashes of disaster into a human factors boom: The legacy of large databases

摘要

The project started as an ergonomic review of customer service operators' jobs in the Australian national telecommunications carrier. The computer system had been purchased without adequate understanding of local technology- and user requirements. Consequently, system adaptations were ongoing for several years from before cutover commenced and well into the development of the fourth generation of the GUI front end. The user interface evaluation identified serious usability problems with screen design, system workflow, and navigation, which severely compromised operators' performance. However, despite these findings and alarming symptoms of stress-related problems among operators, management refused to take ownership of the problems until we presented these in terms of losses to the organization based on simple conversions of data into dollars. The effect of these figures allowed the Human Factors (HF) Team to devise and roll out a comprehensive HF program in which Human Factors activities were integrated into all systems development procedures.