Exploring Effects of Ecological Visual Analytics Interfaces on Experts' and Novices' Decision-Making Processes: A Case Study in Air Traffic Control
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Date
2022
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
Abstract
Operational demands in safety-critical systems impose a risk of failure to the operators especially during urgent situations. Operators of safety-critical systems learn to make decisions effectively throughout extensive training programs and many years of experience. In the domain of air traffic control, expensive training with high dropout rates calls for research to enhance novices' ability to detect and resolve conflicts in the airspace. While previous researchers have mostly focused on redesigning training instructions and programs, the current paper explores possible benefits of novel visual representations to improve novices' understanding of the situations as well as their decision-making process. We conduct an experimental evaluation study testing two ecological visual analytics interfaces, developed in a previous study, as support systems to facilitate novice decisionmaking. The main contribution of this paper is threefold. First, we describe the application of an ecological interface design approach to the development of two visual analytics interfaces. Second, we perform a human-in-the-loop experiment with fortyfive novices within a simplified air traffic control simulation environment. Third, by performing an expert-novice comparison we investigate the extent to which effects of the proposed interfaces can be attributed to the subjects' expertise. The results show that the proposed ecological visual analytics interfaces improved novices' understanding of the information about conflicts as well as their problem-solving performance. Further, the results show that the beneficial effects of the proposed interfaces were more attributable to the visual representations than the users' expertise.
Description
CCS Concepts: Human-centered computing --> Visual analytics; visualization design and evaluation methods; Hardware --> Safety critical systems
@article{10.1111:cgf.14554,
journal = {Computer Graphics Forum},
title = {{Exploring Effects of Ecological Visual Analytics Interfaces on Experts' and Novices' Decision-Making Processes: A Case Study in Air Traffic Control}},
author = {Zohrevandi, Elmira and Westin, Carl A. L. and Vrotsou, Katerina and Lundberg, Jonas},
year = {2022},
publisher = {The Eurographics Association and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.},
ISSN = {1467-8659},
DOI = {10.1111/cgf.14554}
}