HFES Standards

Since the early 1980s, HFES has participated in the development of American national standards and has worked to establish U.S. positions for international standards. In 1988, HFES published ANSI/HFS 100-1988, American National Standard for Human Factors Engineering of Visual Display Terminal Workstations. This groundbreaking standard established voluntary specifications for the ergonomic design of computer workstations for the seated operator. In the 1990s, the Society refined and consolidated its standards activities and embarked on a revision of ANSI/HFS 100‑1988. In 2007, the American National Standards Institute approved ANSI/HFES 100‑2007, Human Factors Engineering of Computer Workstations, as a new American National Standard.


HFES is involved in technical standards work at the international level as well. It administers the U.S. Technical Advisory Group (TAG) to ISO Technical Committee (TC) 159 ‑ Ergonomics. Members of HFES have also served as individual members on a wide variety of standards committees sponsored by other organizations.


In the past few years, a long-standing effort within HFES to promote human factors/ergonomics standards for software at the national and international levels has resulted in the publication of a new American National Standard, Human Factors Engineering of Software User Interfaces (HFES 200). Also in the 1990s, the Society established the HFES Institute, which to this day serves as the formal structure within which HFES standards development activities occur.


More recently, the Society has begun to focus on best practice documents as an efficient and effective vehicle for consolidating and reducing to practice the research findings in the field. HFES 300, Guidelines for Using Anthropometric Data in Product Design, is the first such effort. HFES continues to participate as a member of the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and ISO.


In early 2013, a new working group (ISO/TC 159/SC1/WG5) met in Berlin for the first time for the purpose of producing a series of ergonomic process standards. The first standard to be produced will focus on the responsibilities of organizational executives with respect to ergonomics processes. As part of developing this standard, the two project leads – Tomas Berns (Sweden) and Tom Stewart (UK) have developed a short paper introducing the project and soliciting input from stakeholders. The paper, in its entirety, can be downloaded here. Those who wish to comment may contact the authors directly, and anyone wishing to become involved in this project by joining ISO/TC159/SC1/WG5 should contact the convener, Daryle Gardner‑Bonneau.


Recent standards efforts are documented in a number of news reports. For more information, or to indicate a willingness to participate in HFES standards activities, please send an e‑mail to HFES Executive Director Lynn Strother.