Staying Up to Speed: Four Design Principles for Maintaining and Recovering Situation Awareness

Abstract

Dynamic operational tasks, such as airspace monitoring and civil emergency operations, require maintaining awareness of changing situations, in part by detecting and interpreting significant changes. Poor change detection ability makes this maintenance difficult enough while monitoring a situation display uninterrupted, but multitasking and interruptions increase the difficulty because the situation can change during the interruptions. Yet little research has addressed the need for better interface tools to help users detect and interpret changes, either to maintain situation awareness or to recover it following interruptions. The objective of this article is to present a principled, theoretical basis for designing interface tools that help users recover and maintain situation awareness in dynamic operational tasks. First, we present a framework for understanding the processes of interruption recovery during dynamic tasks within the broader context of interruption recovery generally. Then we briefly review a series of experiments, primarily from our own laboratory, from which we derive four design principles. Last, we contrast a number of interface designs in terms of the principles. Consideration of the four principles should facilitate the design of more effective tools to help users get back up to speed for these important and high-risk tasks.

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