Effects of coherent, integrated, and context-dependent adaptable user interfaces on operators’ situation awareness, performance, and workload

Abstract

Nautical traffic management in The Netherlands is shifting from local traffic control to corridor traffic management. Current traffic management systems do not sufficiently support operators in perceptual and cognitive process to interpret and understand the large amounts of information needed for corridor traffic management. Newly developed user interface concepts aim to overcome deficiencies of current interface designs that insufficiently support situation awareness assessment. The effects of these new user interfaces, however, are insufficiently known due to the intricate relations between situation awareness, task performance, and workload. The objective of this study is to evaluate the effects of the three previously developed user interface concepts on operators' situation awareness, task performance, and workload to gain better insights into the benefits and limitations of the user interface design concepts. The effects were tested in a simulator environment. The results show that user interface features of an integrated user interface allowed operators to apply more effective information processing, which resulted in better task performance. Features of a context-dependent adaptable user interface triggered proactive behavior of operators, which resulted in better task performance for tasks in which operators require insight into future activities of the elements in the environment.

Agent Transparency, Situation Awareness, Mental Workload, and Operator Performance: A Systematic Literature Review

“…The studies by Chen et al (2014, 2015) show overall improvements in SA, the study by Selkowitz et al (2017) found improved SA for Level 2 and 3 SA (but did not report overall results), and the results from Skraaning and Jamieson (2021) and Roth et al (2020) show some mixed results depending on how transparency was implemented and which measurement instrument was used respectively. Still, having the information directly perceivable on the interface could reduce the burden on mental processing capacity by reducing the need for keeping multiple information elements in working memory (van Doorn et al, 2021).…”

“…As good SA, without requiring excessive mental effort, increases the probability for good operator performance (Endsley, 1995; van de Merwe et al, 2012; van Doorn et al, 2021), we assessed those studies in which SA, mental workload, and performance were measured together. Five of the 17 studies measured these three variables in conjunction.…”

“…As the function distribution between agents and humans dictate the distribution of tasks, this in turn dictates the human information needs to perform these tasks. Different function distributions therefore lead to different operator tasks, which lead to different information (i.e., transparency) needs (van Doorn et al, 2017). Hence, how functions and tasks are distributed between humans and agents is therefore an important element in understanding the relationship between transparency and human performance.…”

The Influence of Agent Transparency and Complexity on Situation Awareness, Mental Workload, and Task Performance

“…Such roles may require shifting attention between one unit and another, or between one task and another, emphasising the need for rapid assessment of agent performance and 'to quickly get in-the-loop' (Porathe, Fjortoft, & Bratbergsengen, 2020, p. 3). Assuming that human-centred design principles are adequately applied in this study (Endsley et al, 2003;ISO, 2019), this study anticipates that the availability of information that supports transparency, in the form of SA knowledge directly perceivable on the CAGA system's interface, expedites the supervisor's attainment of SA (van Doorn et al, 2021). Therefore, it is hypothesized that users spend less time to comprehend the CAGA system's reasoning when this information is available (Kunze, Summerskill, Marshall, & Filtness, 2019;Roth, Schulte, Schmitt, & Brand, 2020) (see Table 1).…”

“…Here, increased levels of transparency information may provide an additional information burden and the risk of overloading the operator with information that supports transparency is high, especially when increased information leads to display clutter (Moacdieh & Sarter, 2015a). However, despite risks of increased workload with agent transparency, recent studies have not found a clear relationship between these variables (Ezenyilimba et al, 2023;Loïck, Guérin, Rauffet, Chauvin, & Éric, 2023;, possibly because of the use of graphical symbols and integration of transparency information in task displays (Gegoff, Tatasciore, Bowden, McCarley, & Loft, 2023;van de Merwe, et al, 2024a;van Doorn, Horváth, & Rusák, 2021). Building on these findings, this study anticipates that when, first, information requirements are identified based on an iterative human-centred design approach (Endsley et al, 2003;ISO, 2019), second, symbology is developed based on context-specific industry standards (IEC, 2022), and third, transparency information is integrated in the primary task display (Skraaning & Jamieson, 2021;van Doorn et al, 2021), mental workload will not be affected by agent transparency (see Table 1).…”