Designing for Situation Awareness: An Approach to User-Centered Design

Enhancing situational awareness (SA) is a major design goal for projects in many fields, including aviation, ground transportation, air traffic control, nuclear power, medicine, space and systems maintenance, but little information exists in an integral format to support this. Human factors practitioners can be helped to create designs to support SA across a wide variety of domains and design issues by applying theoretical and empirical information on SA to the system design process and by using basic perception guidelines and human-computer interface guidelines. For good user interface design it is helpful to deal with SA as a whole. This requires the gestalt integration of information across a wide variety of information sources where practitioners must juggle multiple competing goals. Designing for Situation Awareness requires that designers understand how people acquire and interpret information in such worlds and appreciate the factors that undermine this process. This reduces the incidence of human error, which has been found to be due largely to failures in SA. Whereas many previous efforts have sort to deal with design at the surface feature level, SA-oriented design seeks to deal with it from the standpoint of the operator's information needs and cognitive processes. Thus it addresses design from a system's perspective.