Despite the increasing number of accidents in process industry caused by human error, there are still too few efforts devoted to this area. This is maibly caused by people's tendency to overestimate human's capability in interacting with their working environment and moreover by the unavailability of reliable analysis methods. Because of the current lack of adequate methods, human factors (HF) analysis is not widely performed in process industry. Some HF technique developed in the process industry were examined regarding their practical applicability and were unfortunately proved to be unsuitable for an elaborate HF analysis. There fore, a new approach was developed, which provides a systematic way in performing a qualitative HF analysis to achieve a safer opration and decrease the number of human failure events. HF consideration during the design of a process plant is the key to minimize accidents caused by human error in process industry. Thus, an approach to incorporate HF into design phase is described in this article, which can help achieving a sager operation as early as possible with minimized costs. (C) 2009 American Institute of Chemical Engineers Process Saf Prog 28: 347-355, 2009