Towards Designing Mobile Applications for Distributed Cooperative Environments Based on Enhanced Task Analysis

Abstract

In many control centre systems several operators have to work together and divide information to be monitored in order to handle the complexity and high amount of information. In certain situations, it becomes essential for operators to work together and exchange information in order to obtain a common situation picture. This applies in particular to the communication between control room operators and field operators. Both operators work with different devices on which relevant information is displayed. The visual representation of information on the HMI (Human Machine Interface) is often optimally adapted to the tasks. However, this adaptation does not take into account how well the HMI supports communication between operators. Often a good adaptation of the HMI to the tasks of different operators can be at the expense of the communication adequacy. The current state of the art offers different methods to optimize an HMI design to good task support. However, there are no approaches that include the ability to communicate and achieve a proper trade-off between task suitability and communication adequacy. The following paper presents an approach that provides heuristic support for the trade-off between good adaptation to the task and suitability for communication between distant operators based on enhanced task analysis.