Situation Awareness Oriented Design: From User's Cognitive Requirements to Creating Effective Supporting Technologies

Abstract

Situation awareness is a fundamental construct driving human decision making in complex, dynamic environments. By creating designs that enhance an operator's awareness of what is happening in a given situation, decision making and performance can improve dramatically. The Situation Awareness-Oriented Design process provides a means to improve human decision-making and performance through optimizing situation awareness. This method has been used to develop and evaluate system design concepts in aviation, medical and information intelligence operations. It features three main components: SA Requirements Analysis, SA-Oriented Design Principles, and SA Measurement and Validation. This design process is user-centered, and derived from a detailed analysis of the goals, decisions and situation awareness requirements of the operator derived through a Cognitive Task Analysis methodology called Goal-Directed Task Analysis. The development of tool suites for supporting high levels of situation awareness in military command and control are presented to illustrate the use of the SA-Oriented Design process for translating the results of cognitive task analyses into to user-centered system designs.