So, what is human factors (or ergonomics)? You would have thought that a domain that busies itself with creating a fit between people and their tools and surroundings would have chosen a name that fits people's knowledge and preconceptions. But alas. So often human factors professionals find themselves explaining what human factors is. People who call themselves ergonomists have the added difficulty that people find the name hard to pronounce, or plain silly. Oddly enough, you hardly ever see business people having to explain what 'business' is (up until recently at least). In addition to that, as any self-respecting profession, human factors and ergonomics professionals are self-obsessed and feel a need to define themselves.

Those might be some causes for the interesting array of definitions of human factors and ergonomics that Eric Shaver of the Human Factors Blog found in literature. He provides a good overview (including literature references), and, ironically, adds a definition of his own.

By the way, my favorite let's-look-up-this-word tool (visualthesaurus) did not know what human factors is (see image above), but it does know ergonomics. As usual, wikipedia knows them both: human factors, ergonomics.