Human Performance Measures Handbook Review

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(More customer reviews)This book was written to fill a definite need for applied human factors practitioners. Unfortunately, the frustrations outweigh the benefits. It does catalogue a number of measures, but fails to succeed in its aim. The text reads more like a stack of literature review notecards than a handbook or guide. At times, it hands out results without talking about what a given researcher was measuring or addressing. It is almost as if they published an expanded draft outline instead of the real book it was supposed to grow into.
It's title clearly states that it addresses Human Performance Measures. Liberally splashed in amongst the measures, however, are entry after entry of experimental tasks that present vague task results without talking about the measures used to determine those results. It does so without pointing out that these items are tasks, not measures. When it does address true measures, it offers no explanation of when that type of measure is appropriate, or even how to use it. Instead, in simple literature review fashion, it simply cites results of different journal articles.
This volume is completely hamstrung by the publisher formatting of the text. When you flip through the book, it appears to be a single, 188-page-long run-on paragraph. Reading a specific section reveals the same problem: headers and subheaders are barely (if at all) distinguishable from the text, which is of low to moderate value anyways.
It is a perfect example of an information flea market - There are a very few good bits of information in there, but you have to spend a whole lot of time digging around to find it. The topic was a great idea, but the execution was lacking. It just takes too much digging time for the potential payoff.

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Human Performance Measures Handbook was developed to help researchers and practitioners select measures to be used in the evaluation of human/machine systems and helps them seek better, more efficient and effective ways to characterize and measure the human element as part of the system. This book guides the reader through the critical process of selecting the appropriate measures of human performance and workload, and later provides specific examples of such. It begins with an overview of the steps involved in developing a test to measure human performance, workload, and/or situational awareness. This is followed by a definition of human performance and a review of human performance measures. Workload and situational awareness are similarly treated in subsequent chapters.

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