Most people have heard of ergonomics by now, even if they don't fully understand it. If you've heard of ergonomics, you might have contemplated some of the claims about it and wondered if you're being pitched snake oil, religious fervor or something in between. Whether understood or not, we all intuitively use sound ergonomic principles every day. How can this be? Well, intuition only goes so far, and some of us are better at it than others. We're going to dig deeper, though, and surprise ourselves at the simplicity that underpins basic ergonomic theory. We'll look at some of the underlying metrics and get a better understanding of how we can leverage this information, so the claims go from unverified snappy patter to concepts that are literally painless to embrace. We'll also take a brief current-state survey and see some practical implementations you'll want to consider for your own applications.

Author: Douglas Hall