The Usability Evaluation of a Touch Screen in the Flight Deck

Abstract

This chapter presents and discusses an Expert Usability Evaluation for a flight deck touch screen prototype, carried out in one European co-funded project called ALICIA (www.alicia-project.eu). Through the presentation of this evaluation activity and its impact on the rest of design process, this chapter will address some methodological issues on usability in complex domains: 1) The specific context in which the technology is introduced has to be well known by the designers as it provides crucial constraints to be taken into account; 2) Evaluating complex safety critical systems entails the use of a holistic multidisciplinary approach and an iterative design process that involve, in different phases, several type of experts (engineers, human factors, usability experts, end users and stakeholders); and 3) The level of maturity of the technology and the evaluation objectives contribute to the definition of the evaluation methods to be used.