Customer Reviews

Designing for Situation Awareness: An Approach to User-Centered Design

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
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This is a Should Read for anyone involved with the design of information technology to support complex problem-solving and decision-making in any setting. It's a Must Read for anyone working with highly dynamic situations or critical situation management, including emergency and disaster response. Dr. Endsley and her co-authors not only lay out a very thorough explanation of the design challenges imposed by human cognitive behaviors and limitations, but also review in depth the research that reveals these behaviors and limitations. They then present a very comprehensive set of guidelines for addressing these challenges in design.

Chapter 4 should be required reading for all user interface design practitioners and students. In this chapter, Dr. Endsley (who comes from the human factors and ergonomics field) and her colleagues lay out a much better description of the process of designing and developing user interface software than any I have seen anywhere in the human-computer interaction or software engineering literature.

This book is the result of years of exhaustive research that sets a gold standard for use-inspired basic research. It is useful to researchers as well as practitioners. I am in awe of the quality of the work and the quality of the results.

The correspondence between this work and that of Alan Cooper (The Inmates Are Running the Asylum: Why High Tech Products Drive Us Crazy and How to Restore the Sanity and About Face 3: The Essentials of Interaction Design) are staggering. Dr. Endsley and her co-writers rail about how a technology focus leads to poor user interfaces, and recommend a user-centered design approach including "Goal-directed Task Analysis." Alan Cooper rails about how a technology focus leads to poor user interfaces and recommends a user-focused approach he calls "Goal-Directed Design." The difference between this book and Cooper's books is the wealth of dramatic examples and underlying research in Designing for Situation Awareness.

Situation Awareness refers to the OO of the OODA loop - getting input from the environment - Observing - and understanding the significance of that input now and in the future - Orienting. It is a concept used widely in aviation, medicine, and the military - areas where life and death decisions are routinely made based on situation awareness.

One study cited in this book identifies flawed situation awareness as the root cause of 88% of aircraft crashes due to human error. In the remaining 12% the wrong decision was made or there was a problem with execution. With these sobering figures, this book lays out design guidelines to enhance situation awareness.

A formal situation awareness design approach would involve realistic prototyping and rigorous testing as you'd expect for anything related to aviation or medicine. This book provides 50 concrete design principles in six different areas to assist this formal design cycle, but as the book says: "These principles can be applied to a wide range of systems from a variety of domains where achieving and maintaining SA [Situation Awareness] is challenging."

Anyone designing interfaces to support situation awareness or quick comprehension - like performance dashboards - can learn from this book. Unlike software design examples, the examples in this book contain flight numbers and phrases like "killing all aboard" that underscore how very critical situation awareness is, and how driven the authors are to help raise the standards of design.

The only minor criticism I can level is a feeling that this book was rushed together; but with the critical importance of the topic I can see why. I look forward to the recently announced second edition.

If you need to understand Situational Awareness (SA), and then use that knowledge to help design interfaces for operators and others who operate high-risk and complex systems, this is the book for you!

Its very good at rendering theory into useful rules for design, and illustrating how a design philosophy would be applied to some real-world problems.

If the book has a weakness, it is that the examples of resultant interfaces do not use the most modern techniques and so LOOK dated and miss out on leveraging newer things that can help (such as REST, portlets and publish/subscribe). Cheap modern computer displays are also much larger (and duplicated) and so more immersive than the ones were at the time the book was written, so extra modalities of salience such as positional characteristics on multi-head displays are important now, but not covered in the book. But the basics are here and so one can readily figure out how this all might apply.

So 5-stars in-spite of the benefits an update might bring.

This is one of the best books I have ever read. I think it is a must read for everyone who is involved in process control. The book has an easy to understand description of a very complex topic. It is full of easy to understand examples. While covering the theory behind situation awareness this book takes it to a different level by making the subject easy to understand by the non-acedemic. If anyone wants to understand why alarm management is a problem read this book. If anyone wants to be success in reducing human error this is the book to help you understand why and how we created the problem and how to fix it.

Ian Nimmo
Founder and origional Program Director for the ASM Consortium
President User Centered Design Services