ACCOUNTING FOR HUMAN ERRORS IN A METHOD FOR THE CONCEPTION OF USER INTERFACES
Maria de Fatima Q. Vieira Turnell
LIHM - DEE
Universidade Federal de Campina Grande,
Campina Grande-PB Brazil
E-mail: fatima@dee.ufcg.edu.br
Key words— Human Interface Design Methods, Industrial safety, Human Error.
ABSTRACT
Although the design of human interfaces acknowledges the importance of the human error and its effects on the performance and safety of both the users and the system, the application of this knowledge into the interface design remains a subject of investigation. This paper addresses the problem of human interface conception for critical system, i.e. systems in which the occurrence of an error may endanger human lives, the environment or the system itself. It discusses how the knowledge on human error and cognition can be applied to the conception of more ergonomic human interfaces and proposes to reduce the human error rate by explicitly accounting for these in the interface design method. It also presents a method which has been conceived to produce human interfaces capable of supporting their users when performing tasks during critical situations and shows how this method can been applied to an industrial context.
1. INTRODUCTION
In the past decades the increase in systems reliability followed by better work practices resulted on the attribution of higher responsibilities to the human operators. In such scenario human errors are now considered a frequent cause of industrial incidents and accidents. These errors frequently result from difficulties in communication between man and machines. Thus it is expected that the quality of the human interface design can influence the incidence of human errors.
In spite of the wide acknowledge of the importance of considering the user behaviour into the human interface design process, the methods available for user interface conception do not explicitly account for it. The vast majority restricts these considerations to a modest level, which consists in designing for specific user profiles. This contrasts with recommendations from the cognitive engineering community, which proposes a variety of cognitive approaches to extract and represent user behaviour.
Methods for the user interface conception and design are numerous. Their approaches reflect the multidisciplinary of this practice. But, no matter which accent has been given to a particular method it must posses a set of characteristics that help designers and lead into a good quality user interface. A method must offer rules to support the designers throughout the conception process. The resulting interface must be passive of validation under different scenarios from the ergonomic point of view. Faced with a great variety of methods to choose from, the interface designers demand for methods which are simple to learn and are supported by tools which simplify and speed up their application.
For a long time the technical component alone allowed for an effective improvement of the safety level of the systems, with the support of disciplines such as certainty of work. Modern systems’ weak point is the human component making the human behaviour during the operation of critical systems the central theme of research.
This paper presents a method for the conception and design of the human interface component of industrial systems. It aims to reduce the incidence of human errors during system operation, particularly under critical situations. The paper is organised in 6 sections. Session 2 discusses the human errors from the industrial automation perspective. Session 3 presents a brief review on interface conception methods, and comments how they integrate the knowledge about the human behaviour into the interface conception process. Session 4 presents the method for the conception of ergonomic user interfaces – MCIE. Session 5 illustrates the application of this method to an industrial context, and Session 6 draws conclusions and proposes future directions for this work.
2. THE HUMAN ERROR
With technology change from mechanical to information based, there has been a change in the human failure concept. For as long as the main technology was
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