"Back in the day, human factors was just a course that we took where we essentially, looking for, how do people interact with the objects?" Explained Mary Beth Privitera, Human Factors Principal at HS Design from her office in Cincinnati. When she got her start, Human Factors Engineering or Human Factor Design were not professions in and of themselves. 

Today, if you look at human factors professionals that go get a degree in human factors, it essentially applies theoretical principles, data and methods in order to optimize the design for the purposes of well-being and overall system performance.

Human Factors really about answering, 'how do we interact with products and systems?' Or 'how do we interact with ourselves?' 

It gets down to when work within the human factors scope is getting done, it's the tools, it's the tasks, it's the environment and taking that all into consideration so that we have a little easier time doing our everyday tasks or when we're on the job or our jobs, the tasks that we have to do related to a job.