Results of Using Affinity Mapping to Clarify Human Factors and Related Disciplines

Deciphering the overlap and differences between User Experience (UX), Customer Experience (CX), Human Centered Design (HCD), and Cognitive Engineering (CE) is a common problem that many practitioners and adjacent stakeholders experience in our field. To address this persistent issue of providing clarity over the terminology used across fields of Human Factors Engineering (HFE) and related disciplines, a Design Thinking Workshop was held at HFES ASPIRE 2025 to document qualitative data related to terminology, techniques, and artifacts of the broader HFE community. This poster summarizes and shares the preliminary results of collecting, synthesizing, and organizing these inputs using the affinity mapping technique in the context of a compressed conference session. The poster will communicate lessons learned with the goal of sharing this methodology with the broader community of practitioners.