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How Not to Have to Navigate Through Too Many Displays
Abstract and Figures
The three trends in information visualization attempting to address the problems caused by large networks of displays of raw data are information animation, integrated representations, and coordination of multiple views. Coordination of multiple views is used to create a virtual perceptual field or a workspace in which practitioners carry out their work activity and is the theme of this chapter. This chapter concerns how the characteristics of computer-based networks of displays shape the cognition and performance of practitioners. The chapter reviews common findings from field studies that have shown how large networks of displays, available through a limited keyhole, can place new mental burdens on users. It also provide an overview of some of the techniques that designers can use to break down the keyhole and help users focus on the relevant portion of the data field as activities unfold. The work in human-computer interaction concerned with this level of analysis of a computer based information system often goes under labels such as navigation, browsing, hypertext, dialogue design, or window management. This chapter discusses ways in which designers can coordinate different kinds of display frames within a virtual workspace. The chapter refers to this level of analysis and design as workspace coordination—the integration of the set of displays and classes of views that can be seen together in parallel or in series as a function of context.
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... All the while, however, empirical studies have shown that when professionals use different scripts that depict different features of a domain, they prefer selecting scripts in which they can link (or integrate) the different information presented (Woods & Watts, 1997). Jabbari and Recker (2017), for example, report that practitioners preferred to use scripts that had some correspondence between them. ...
... mental efforts toward reasoning about multiple scripts (Woods & Watts, 1997). ...
Because most real-world domains intended to be supported by an information system are complex, practitioners often use multiple different types of conceptual modeling scripts to understand them. We performed two experiments to examine how two theoretical factors of multiple scripts, combined ontological completeness and ontological overlap, influence how users develop an understanding of a real-world domain from multiple scripts. Results of the first experiment show that ontological overlap, to some degree, improves participants’ understanding of a domain, more so than combined ontological completeness does. In the second experiment, we tracked eye movement data of participants to be able to understand how ontological overlap between scripts impacts users’ information search and cognitive integration processes. We find that some occurrence of semantically similar constructs between scripts helps individuals to identify and relate constructs presented in different scripts. Users, therefore, can identify, and focus on, script areas that are relevant to their problem tasks. However, a high level of ontological overlap decreases participants’ attention to relevant task-specific areas because they spend more time on searching for relevant information. Together, our findings both refine and extend existing conceptual modeling theory. We clarify the dialectics between full and parsimonious real-world representations offered through multiple scripts and an individual’s understanding of a domain that is represented by those scripts.
... Moreover, large data set with multiple workbooks have its own limitations which are highlighted by many researchers in the past. Navigational issues (by zoom and swiping) (Woods and Watts, 1997), losing focus (Elm and Woods, 1985), finding dependency and linkage among various workbooks (Henderson and Card, 1986) are some issues highlighted previously. ...
... For example, change in an equipment can affect type, systems, component workbooks simultaneously. This problem is significant, pertaining to the fact that checking for changes in such large data set for values and finding the meaning out of it is a challenging, tedious and time-consuming (Elm and Woods, 1985;Woods and Watts, 1997). ...
Purpose
Until now, the usage and usability factors of construction operation building information exchange (COBie) datasheet has remained largely overlooked. This oversight may be the potential factor in the lower adoption rates as well as effective utilization of COBie datasheet in the architectural, engineering and construction – facilities management industry. Cobie Data drops as a concept has difficulty in adoption pertaining to lengthy process of data capturing with high reliance on manual inputs. Finding from this study will enhance the usability aspects of COBie by looking at the entire process of data assembling in conjuncture with design development and using it to understand the project changes. The paper aims to discuss these issues.
Design/methodology/approach
The study is aimed at solving a practical issue in handling COBie datasheets. The study uses iterative steps from design thinking and software development process (SDP) for development of the system. The iterative approach from design thinking helped to understand the problem scenarios, development of rule sets and analysis of various options to tackle this issue. SDP was used for the development and validation of the COBieEvaluator prototype.
Findings
Despite the information exchange standards such as COBie is available for adoption for quite some time, its perceived value in the whole chain is less described. Various concepts such as preparing COBie sheets from beginning of project are discussed but hardly adopted due to lengthy process. The study helps in substantiating the need for a continuous data capture and showcase how this continuous data capture can help in tracking various design and equipment changes inside a project, using COBieEvaluator. A comparative view over the data helps in giving fruitful information about the project. The system also verify the quality of data inside the COBie datasheet by not only looking at the cell value inputs but also looking at the entire information linkage and finding the gaps.
Originality/value
COBie has mostly being analyzed as an output and its benefits. However, some important aspects of COBie datasheet such as the process of capturing and verifying it, and understanding the meaning of the changes during incremental building of COBie datasheet, is largely overlooked. This study use the concept behind COBie data drops and devise a system to help track effect of project design changes on COBie datasheet. It also highlights the importance of not looking COBie datasheets only as a FM handover requirement, but a source of information which can help various stakeholders to get useful information about the project development. The study propose a comparative dimension over the COBie sheet to get useful insight over the project development.
... Users often have to use cognitively demanding visual checks to deduce the semantic connection among the cells, columns and workbooks (Hendry and Green, 1994). The difficulty in navigating through large spreadsheets affects the user's ability to find and understand the relevant information (Woods, 1995;Woods and Watts, 1997). Some of the noted cognitive challenges include: ...
... Keyhole effect (Woods and Watts, 1997) -If the representation of data is distributed and much bigger than the actual computer screen, then users cannot process the data parallel in-mind with what they see on the screen. Instead, they split up the large structure and navigate the predecessor/successor sections via zoom and/or move-to actions. ...
Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to describe the technical features, underlying concepts and implementation details of a novel Building Information Modeling (BIM)-integrated, graph-based platform developed to support BIM for facilities management through a usability driven visual representation of the construction operations building information exchange (COBie) spreadsheet data.
Design/methodology/approach
This paper is based on the iterative steps of design thinking and agile software development methodology. The conceptual development of the VisualCOBie platform is based on Gestalt’s principles of visual perception to facilitate usability and comprehension of the COBie data.
Findings
The paper demonstrates that Gestalt’s principles of visual perception provide a suitable conceptual as well as implementable basis for improving the usability and comprehension of COBie spreadsheets. The implemented BIM-integrated, graph-based VisualCOBie platform supports visual navigation and dynamic search, reducing the cognitive load of large spreadsheets that are common in facilities management software.
Research limitations/implications
The usability, visual search and dependencies-based search of VisualCOBie can potentially transform how we implement and use facilities and information management systems in construction, where large spreadsheets are frequently used in conjunction with BIM and other tools. VisualCOBie also provides usability-based step towards BIM for facilities management.
Originality/value
The VisualCOBie approach provides a novel user interface and information management platform. This paper may also foster a potential paradigm shift in our approach to the representation and use of information exchange standards such as COBie, which are required to facilitate the research and practice on BIM for facilities management.
... Users' ability to find or discover patterns can grow as users gain experience at monitoring the system through the lens of the representation (Hoffman and Fiore, 2007). Well-designed circular forms also provide a longshot perspective that helps users navigate the large space of potential views of data in modern systems reducing the risk of getting lost in massive data spaces (Woods and Watts, 1997). ...
... Identifying a change will mean that a person needs to conduct multiple actions such as zoom in/out, scroll down, and filtering and sorting. These challenges related to spreadsheet format have been highlighted previously by various researchers (Henderson Jr & Card, 1986;Woods & Watts, 1997;Yalcinkaya & Singh, 2019a). When a large amount of data is stored in a spreadsheet format, identifying linked data changes becomes challenging (Yalcinkaya, 2017). ...
Building information modeling (BIM) for facilities management (FM) has been gaining considerable attention. Construction operations building information exchange (COBie) datasheets are conceptualized as an electronic format of data for FM handover extracted from the BIM model and supplemented with information from other sources. To build an efficient COBie datasheet, it is advocated to build and verify data at all stages of design and construction, commonly known as data drops. Nevertheless, data consistency verification is a difficult task pertaining to COBie's complex structure and data representation. This study aims to understand the challenges associated with the COBie datasheet verification and consistency checking process, especially during data drop stages, and develop a solution to mitigate these challenges. The study uses a combined methodology of design thinking and waterfall model from the software development process. The outcome of the research study manifests in a prototype application. The prototype application can help in verifying COBie datasheet consistency during data drop stages. Additionally, this study proposes a new dimension to utilize the COBie datasheet to track various asset-related changes in a project by comparing COBie datasheets and visualizing this data in a visually interactive manner using a property graph model.
... Similarly, COBie deliverable for mid-size projects such as, office building, can generate a hundred thousand of rows of information while complex projects such as a hospital can generate over million rows, going beyond the technical limit of spreadsheet file (AEC Magazine, 2014). It was found that navigation through large spreadsheets affects the decision and actions that contribute to the ability of the user to understand relevant information (Woods, 1984;Woods and Watts, 1997). Helander et al. (1997) termed this effect has a key-hole effect where the users navigate through zoom and move-to actions to interpret a spreadsheet. ...
Purpose
Until now, the usage and usability factors of Construction Operation Building information exchange (COBie) datasheet have remained largely overlooked. This oversight may be the potential factor in the lower adoption rates as well as the effective usage of COBie datasheet in the architecture, engineering and construction-facilities management industry. The purpose of this study is to investigate the benefits and key issues associated with COBie datasheet handling and identify the key technological solutions, which can help in mitigating the identified issues.
Design/methodology/approach
A literature review was conducted to identify the key benefits of using COBie and issues, which are associated with COBie datasheet handling. This paper has also designed a questionnaire based on a literature review and surveyed professionals who are well versed with handling COBie datasheet. Using responses, the issues are analyzed and discussed using non-parametric statistical analysis.
Findings
A total of 9 key benefits and 24 key issues categorized under three groups of usability issues, technical issues and organizational/other issues were identified. The results from the survey agree with all the key issues associated with COBie datasheet handling (with 86 responses). This research also proposes key ideas, that can help in mitigating these issues.
Originality/value
There is a paucity in published literature, which discusses in detail about the various issues associated with COBie datasheet handling. This research study aims to address this gap by identifying key issues by looking at the entire COBie data-capturing process holistically. Finding from this study can help professionals to understand these issues and develop appropriate technological solutions, which can make COBie data capturing and understanding easier. The findings could also assist in increasing the adoption rate of COBie, which could be achieved through mitigation of identified issues.
... The analysis and interpretation of the results from the previous chapters serve as the basis for decision support concepts framing the design of a Learning Lab design planning tool. The fundamental representation for the planning tool is built on a longshot (Woods & Watts, 1997). Longshots for navigation have proven immensely rich in representation design which adhere to the basic CSE representation design principle the navigation mechanism should be a model of the topic to being navigated. ...
In many mission critical work domains effective scenario based training and observation are crucial to the success of complex socio-technical systems. Organizations employ many different approaches toward conducting these kinds of training sessions, but as recent high surprise disasters such as the Columbia loss and the 9.11 terrorist attacks indicate, there will always be new surprises that put that learning efficacy to the test. Anomalies will oc- cur, new failure conditions will challenge existing systems and organizations, and these challenges of adapting to surprise and to resilience are nowhere more evident than in these mission critical domains. However, a significant amount of the training conducted in these types of organizations is not about training to be surprised, rather, its about showing indi- vidual competency and that current training is effective. These large-scale socio-technical organizations could be more resilient if they effectively exploit the opportunities from these exercises to capture learning and facilitate a deeper understanding behind the cognitive work in the domain.
This thesis proposes the learning laboratory as a support framework for such exercise de- sign. The learning lab framework serves as a general abstraction of CSE staged world study design and envisioning techniques and extends these approaches to cope with new scalability challenges to resilience. CSE has a long history of conducting research in com- plex domains utilizing effective staged and scaled world design techniques to support and illustrate the critical cognitive challenges of practitioners at work. The learning lab incor- porates a variety of these techniques into a common framework that can be applied to a variety of different types of exercises already being conducted in order to maximize organ- izational understanding and learning from scenario based observation exercises.
... The goal of visual momentum is to help users find the right information more effectively, whether it is located on another screen, within a screen, or within a display. A number of design techniques have been devised to increase visual momentum (Bennett & Flach, 2012;Watts-Perotti & Woods, 1999;Woods, 1984;Woods & Watts, 1997). Some examples from the ecological interface are provided. ...
Objective:
A prototype ecological interface for computer network defense (CND) was developed.
Background:
Concerns about CND run high. Although there is a vast literature on CND, there is some indication that this research is not being translated into operational contexts. Part of the reason may be that CND has historically been treated as a strictly technical problem, rather than as a socio-technical problem.
Methods:
The cognitive systems engineering (CSE)/ecological interface design (EID) framework was used in the analysis and design of the prototype interface. A brief overview of CSE/EID is provided. EID principles of design (i.e., direct perception, direct manipulation and visual momentum) are described and illustrated through concrete examples from the ecological interface.
Results:
Key features of the ecological interface include (a) a wide variety of alternative visual displays, (b) controls that allow easy, dynamic reconfiguration of these displays, (c) visual highlighting of functionally related information across displays, (d) control mechanisms to selectively filter massive data sets, and (e) the capability for easy expansion. Cyber attacks from a well-known data set are illustrated through screen shots.
Conclusion:
CND support needs to be developed with a triadic focus (i.e., humans interacting with technology to accomplish work) if it is to be effective. Iterative design and formal evaluation is also required. The discipline of human factors has a long tradition of success on both counts; it is time that HF became fully involved in CND.
Application:
Direct application in supporting cyber analysts.
... This is actually a very flexible interface for organizing data for analysis and new folders can easily be created by the user for user-defined collections and populated by simply copying from other folders. The Google Earth display is also an example of an overview display (Chapman & Carlson, 2004;Woods & Watts, 1997). Overview displays include specific capabilities to support interactions with the display. ...
This paper describes the design and development of a mobile computer based software prototype, AWARE, that supports geographical situation awareness (GSA) performance measurement and after action review during field training exercises. The goal of the AWARE project is to create a customizable tool for designing, conducting, analyzing and presenting the results of research involving GSA in distributed work situations that can efficiently capture human participant beliefs and support comparing them to reality in context rich after action reviews that occur shortly after the exercises. Innovation in AWARE includes the capturing of multimodal gesturing as participants annotate a map while verbalizing their beliefs about the location of entities and the use of Google Earth to not only provide high fidelity and navigation tools for viewing map imagery, but to also support organizing data into appropriate clusters for visual analyze. Pilot study data provides preliminary evidence that this prototype is able to achieve the design goals and suggests areas for further development.
Direct manipulation has been lauded as a good form of interface design, and some interfaces that have this property have been well received by users. In this article we seek a cognitive account of both the advantages and disadvantages of direct manipulation interfaces. We identify two underlying phenomena that give rise to the feeling of directness. One deals with the information processing distance between the user's intentions and the facilities provided by the machine. Reduction of this distance makes the interface feel direct by reducing the effort required of the user to accomplish goals. The second phenomenon concerns the relation between the input and output vocabularies of the interface language. In particular, direct manipulation requires that the system provide representations of objects that behave as if they are the objects themselves. This provides the feeling of directness of manipulation.
In this paper, we examine how users interact with a computer-based infusion device adapted for terbutaline infusion to treat preterm labor in women experiencing high-risk pregnancies. This study examines: (1) the HCI deficiencies in the device as related to this context of use, (2) how the device characteristics increase the potential for error, and (3) the tailoring strategies developed by users to insulate themselves from failure. Interviews with nurses and bench tests of the behavior of the infusion device in different conditions identified several HCI deficiencies: complex and arbitrary sequences of operation, mode errors due to poor differentiation of multiple operating modes intended for different contexts, ambiguous alarms, getting lost in multiple displays, and poor feedback on device state and behavior.
This paper describes an application of principles of spatial data management to correct for an information handling problem, the “getting lost” phenomena in a large multiple display network. The application is the computerization (e.g., electronic book) of a book of procedures for use by nuclear power plant operators during accident conditions.
The human/computer interface for many information retrieval systems is a hierarchical menu structure. Although this type of interface has several advantages for novice users, there is great potential for confusion and disorientation when menu structures are large and complex. This experiment demonstrated that subjects given the opportunity to study a map of the menu organization for a prototype database showed an overall improvement in information retrieval performance across time. Subjects who studied a linear index of correct menu choice sequences showed a general decline in performance as the time between studying the index and new retrieval tasks increased. A control group was slower and made more unnecessary choices than either the map or index group. The results suggest that access to a pictorial representation of a menu structure facilitates the development of a workable, relatively long-lasting mental model of that structure.
The goal of this research is to provide a cognitive analysis of navigation in the computer medium. As the complexity of computerized information systems increases, interface designers face the formidable challenge of supporting navigation within these systems to allow users to quickly obtain information relevant to their tasks and goals. Instead of focusing solely on the comparison of a small subset of proposed techniques or theories for aiding navigation, this study investigates how people handle navigation within the natural context of a familiar computer environment, and reveals processes that can be better supported in order to aid navigation. Both a field study and a field experiment were conducted. The results of these studies provide evidence to support previous navigation-related theories and contribute to a pattern of navigation behavior that has been observed in other domains like anesthesiology and nuclear power. In addition to describing the characteristics of the computer medium that influence people's ability to navigate, this paper will also discuss typical navigation problems that arise in this medium, and how people change their behavior and adapt to computer systems to overcome these problems.
The power of hypertext stems chiefly from the complex networks of conceptual links which hypertext documents can render explicit. This paper describes an array of orientation tools which help readers to choose a course through a complex information network without undue confusion or discomfort, while retaining the excitement and spontaneity users often experience when exploring complex information environments.
This patent describes an apparatus for producing a discrete state display for a pressurized water nuclear reactor process. It comprises: data acquisition and status tree computation means for sampling process control data, determining a value of a discrete process parameter and creating first through third accessible displays in dependence on the parameter value; and display means for displaying the first through third displays independence upon the parameter and an operator request.