Keynote: Assessing and Measuring Human Factors - Trends and Developments

How can we measure people’s engagement with a program, a museum exhibition, and a hike through nature? The talk will be about assessing and measuring human factors using different methods in different contexts beyond measuring the usability of computer programs on a desktop computer. We report on how to assess user engagement for exhibits in science centres and museums. This method for measuring engagement is robust and can be extended to cover teaching scenarios using a robot as an assistant, a planned app for pensioners about cultural experiences, and engagement for organized hiking tours. Engagement is not the only factor that is important in museums; it is also important to know how accessible an exhibition is to people with disabilities. Indeed, assessing technologies such as social robots and extended reality are still not solved for people with disabilities. Finally, the ongoing Covid-19 pandemic poses challenges to assessment of human factors, forcing researchers to think in new ways. We can find many adjustments to research in recent articles on human factors to accommodate the limitations that occurred from the pandemic.