What Is Ergonomics?

Ergonomics is derived from two Greek words: “ergon”, meaning work and “nomoi”, meaning natural laws.
It's the scientific discipline concerned with designing according to the human needs, and the profession that applies theory, principles, data and methods to design in order to optimize human well-being and overall system performance. The field is also called human engineering, and human factors engineering.

Ergonomic research is primarily performed by ergonomists, who study human capabilities in relationship to their work demands. Information derived from ergonomists contributes to the design and evaluation of tasks, jobs, products, environments and systems in order to make them compatible with the needs, abilities and limitations of people.

To assess the fit between a person and their work, ergonomists consider:

• the job being done and the demands on the worker;
• the equipment used (its size, shape, and how appropriate it is for the task);
• the information used (how it is presented, accessed, and changed).

Five aspects of ergonomics

There are five aspects of ergonomics, safety, comfort, ease of use, productivity/performance, and aesthetics. Based on these aspects of ergonomics, examples are given of how products or systems could benefit from redesign based on ergonomic principles.

1. Safety - Medicine bottles: The print on them could be larger so that a sick person who may have impaired vision (due to sinuses, etc.) can more easily see the dosages and label. Ergonomics could design the print style, color and size for optimal viewing.
2. Comfort - Alarm clock display: Some displays are harshly bright, drawing one’s eye to the light when surroundings are dark. Ergonomic principles could redesign this based on contrast principles.
3. Ease of use - Street Signs: In a strange area, many times it is difficult to spot street signs. This could be addressed with the principles of visual detection in ergonomics.
4. Productivity/performance - HD TV: The sound on HD TV is much lower than regular TV. So when you switch from HD to regular, the volume increases dramatically. Ergonomics recognizes that this difference in decibel level creates a difference in loudness and hurts human ears and this could be solved by evening out the decibel levels. Voicemail instructions: It takes too long to have to listen to all of the obvious instructions. Ergonomics could address this by providing more options to the user, enabling them to easily and quickly skip the instructions.
5. Aesthetics - Signs in the workplace: Signage should be made consistent throughout the workplace to not only be aesthetically pleasing, but also so that information is easily accessible for all signs

Source: Wikipedia, Ergonomics.Org