Human centred design principles

Railway workers throughout an organisation need to access and modify information, they must issue commands and respond to instructions, they carry out critical actions and they have to handle documentation. The information to be processed by the human being ranges from red/green aspects, signifying stop or proceed, to the complex patterns related to taking operational decisions. Most of the staffs work impacts in some way on the safe, effective and efficient operation of a system with many subsystems. It is therefore essential that both the design and the implementation of the necessary human-machine interfaces are appropriate to the tasks being performed, if the system railway is to operate safely, reliably and beneficially. The author of this paper discusses the issue of human centred design and reviews some of the approaches which can be used to improve the performance of people who are in charge of complex systems. Where appropriate, he uses examples from the railway industry as illustrations.