A Heuristic for relative Perception Accuracy and Reaction Time Estimation for HMI Designs

A human operator monitoring a safety-critical system has to gather information fast and accurate to detect problems and execute countermeasures in time. So far testing such HMIs is a complex task, since it requires HMI design prototypes embedded into simulated environments to perform tests with professional operators. We propose Konect Value, a heuristic to estimate the relative perception accuracy and operator reaction time already in the HMI design phase. The model-based estimation heuristic solely requires a task model and HMI design sketches as an input. The evaluation metric was applied to seven different HMIs, which were designed by Human Factor experts to support truck platooning. A comparison of the estimated accuracy and reaction times of Konect Value to a lab study (n=33) revealed high correlations for the relative reaction time (r=0.83, p<0.05) and also the relative perception accuracy (r=-0.90, p<0.01). This indicates that Konect Value is a promising heuristic for early HMI design evaluation in the safety-critical system domain.