The FAA's Human Factors Design Standard

From monkeyPi (mentioned in the previous post) I learned that the FAA publishes a document called the Human Factors Design Standard, available for free at the following link, once you enter some information about yourself: HFDS.

It's intended primarily for FAA-related work, but no doubt it would be useful reading for many others. From their description:

The Human Factors Design Standard (HFDS) is an important work in the field of human factors. It is an exhaustive compilation of human factors practices and principles integral to the procurement, design, development, and testing of FAA systems, facilities, and equipment.

The purpose of the HFDS is to provide a single easy-to-use source of human factors design criteria, oriented to the needs of the FAA mission and systems. An additional goal is to facilitate use of appropriate design criteria by organizing the document so that users can easily locate the needed information.

I've only glanced at Chapter 9, which includes some information about touch interfaces. They recommend that touch targets be at least 19 mm on a side. That's about 4 times bigger than typical buttons on the iPhone and other mobiles -- clearly the requirements are different when you're designing for airplanes.

NASA also has a human factors site that's well worth browsing: Human Systems Integration Division. There's even a Human Factors 101 tutorial.