Book•
Skills, rules, and knowledge; signals, signs, and symbols, and other distinctions in human performance models
01 Jan 1987-pp 291-300
TL;DR: In this paper, a discussion of the requirement for different types of models for representing performance at the skill-, rule-, and knowledge-based levels, together with a review of the different levels in terms of signals, signs, and symbols is presented.
Abstract: The introduction of information technology based on digital computers for the design of man-machine interface systems has led to a requirement for consistent models of human performance in routine task environments and during unfamiliar task conditions. A discussion is presented of the requirement for different types of models for representing performance at the skill-, rule-, and knowledge-based levels, together with a review of the different levels in terms of signals, signs, and symbols. Particular attention is paid to the different possible ways of representing system properties which underlie knowledge-based performance and which can be characterised at several levels of abstraction-from the representation of physical form, through functional representation, to representation in terms of intention or purpose. Furthermore, the role of qualitative and quantitative models in the design and evaluation of interface systems is mentioned, and the need to consider such distinctions carefully is discussed.
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Book•
01 Jan 1993
TL;DR: This guide to the methods of usability engineering provides cost-effective methods that will help developers improve their user interfaces immediately and shows you how to avoid the four most frequently listed reasons for delay in software projects.
Abstract: From the Publisher:
Written by the author of the best-selling HyperText & HyperMedia, this book provides an excellent guide to the methods of usability engineering. Special features: emphasizes cost-effective methods that will help developers improve their user interfaces immediately, shows you how to avoid the four most frequently listed reasons for delay in software projects, provides step-by-step information about which methods to use at various stages during the development life cycle, and offers information on the unique issues relating to informational usability. You do not need to have previous knowledge of usability to implement the methods provided, yet all of the latest research is covered.
11,929 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the results of a multi-year research program to identify the factors associated with variations in subjective workload within and between different types of tasks are reviewed, including task-, behavior-, and subject-related correlates of subjective workload experiences.
Abstract: The results of a multi-year research program to identify the factors associated with variations in subjective workload within and between different types of tasks are reviewed. Subjective evaluations of 10 workload-related factors were obtained from 16 different experiments. The experimental tasks included simple cognitive and manual control tasks, complex laboratory and supervisory control tasks, and aircraft simulation. Task-, behavior-, and subject-related correlates of subjective workload experiences varied as a function of difficulty manipulations within experiments, different sources of workload between experiments, and individual differences in workload definition. A multi-dimensional rating scale is proposed in which information about the magnitude and sources of six workload-related factors are combined to derive a sensitive and reliable estimate of workload.
11,418 citations
01 Jan 2007
TL;DR: In this article, the authors reveal how smart design is the new competitive frontier, and why some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them, and how to choose the ones that satisfy customers.
Abstract: Revealing how smart design is the new competitive frontier, this innovative book is a powerful primer on how--and why--some products satisfy customers while others only frustrate them.
7,238 citations
TL;DR: This review considers trust from the organizational, sociological, interpersonal, psychological, and neurological perspectives, and considers how the context, automation characteristics, and cognitive processes affect the appropriateness of trust.
Abstract: Automation is often problematic because people fail to rely upon it appropriately. Because people respond to technology socially, trust influences reliance on automation. In particular, trust guides reliance when complexity and unanticipated situations make a complete understanding of the automation impractical. This review considers trust from the organizational, sociological, interpersonal, psychological, and neurological perspectives. It considers how the context, automation characteristics, and cognitive processes affect the appropriateness of trust. The context in which the automation is used influences automation performance and provides a goal-oriented perspective to assess automation characteristics along a dimension of attributional abstraction. These characteristics can influence trust through analytic, analogical, and affective processes. The challenges of extrapolating the concept of trust in people to trust in automation are discussed. A conceptual model integrates research regarding trust in automation and describes the dynamics of trust, the role of context, and the influence of display characteristics. Actual or potential applications of this research include improved designs of systems that require people to manage imperfect automation.
3,105 citations
TL;DR: It is argued that risk management must be modelled by cross-disciplinary studies, considering risk management to be a control problem and serving to represent the control structure involving all levels of society for each particular hazard category, and that this requires a system-oriented approach based on functional abstraction rather than structural decomposition.
2,547 citations
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01 Jun 1972TL;DR: The aim of the book is to advance the understanding of how humans think by putting forth a theory of human problem solving, along with a body of empirical evidence that permits assessment of the theory.
Abstract: : The aim of the book is to advance the understanding of how humans think. It seeks to do so by putting forth a theory of human problem solving, along with a body of empirical evidence that permits assessment of the theory. (Author)
10,770 citations
6,484 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1964
TL;DR: In the unselfconscious process of design, there is no possibility of misconstruing the situation as discussed by the authors, since the model cannot be wrong and the model is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem.
Abstract: Every design problem begins with an effort to achieve fitness between two entities: the form in question and its context. The form is the solution to the problem; the context defines the problem. We want to put the context and the form into effortless contact or frictionless coexistence, i.e., we want to find a good fit. For a good fit to occur in practice, one vital condition must be satisfied. It must have time to happen. In slow-changing, traditional, unselfconscious cultures, a form is adjusted soon after each slight misfit occurs. If there was good fit at some stage in the past, no matter how removed, it will have persisted, because there is an active stability at work. Tradition and taboo dampen and control the rate of change in an unselfconscious culture's designs. It is important to understand that the individual person in an unselfconscious culture needs no creative strength. He does not need to be able to improve the form, only to make some sort of change when he notices a failure. The changes may not always be for the better; but it is not necessary that they should be, since the operation of the process allows only the improvements to persist. Unselfconscious design is a process of slow adaptation and error reduction. In the unselfconscious process there is no possibility of misconstruing the situation. Nobody makes a picture of the context, so the picture cannot be wrong. But the modern, selfconscious designer works entirely from a picture in his mind - a conceptualization of the forces at work and their interrelationships - and this picture is almost always wrong. To achieve in a few hours at the drawing board what once took centuries of adaptation and development, to invent a form suddenly which clearly fits its context - the extent of invention necessary is beyond the individual designer. A designer who sets out to achieve an adaptive good fit in a single leap is not unlike the child who shakes his glass-topped puzzle fretfully, expecting at one shake to arrange the bits inside correctly. The designer's attempt is hardly as random as the child's is; but the difficulties are the same. His chances of success are small because the number of factors which must fall simultaneously into place is so enormous. The process of design, even when it has become selfconscious, remains a process of error-reduction. No complex system will succeed in adapting in a reasonable amount of time or effort unless the adaptation can proceed component by component, each component relatively independent of the others. The search for the right components, and the right way to build the form up from these components, is the greatest challenge faced by the modern, selfconscious designer. The culmination of the modern designer's task is to make every unit of design both a component and a system. As a component it will fit into the hierarchy of larger components that are above it; as a system it will specify the hierarchy of smaller components of which it itself is made.
2,447 citations
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors define the behavioristic study of natural events and classify behavior, and stress the importance of the concept of purpose in the study of purpose-based natural events.
Abstract: This essay has two goals. The first is to define the behavioristic study of natural events and to classify behavior. The second is to stress the importance of the concept of purpose.
1,217 citations
TL;DR: Pew as discussed by the authors used a tutorial approach to cover seven discrete regions within the general domain of human information processing, focusing on commonalities between human performance and human cognition aspects of information processing rather than on the differences between these two approaches.
Abstract: The present volume, by utilizing a tutorial approach, covers some seven discrete regions within the general domain of human information processing. What does this volume convey that is truly unique, considering the recent proliferation of such books? Most happily, there is much that is unique, and this volume is in no sense another redundant and tired repetition of past reviews of the literature. Perhaps its most distinguishing characteristic is its approach to methodological issues and its emphasis on the commonalities "between human performance and human cognition aspects of information processing" (p. ix) rather than on the differences between these two approaches. As the editor says in his preface, "the tutorial style is aimed at two audiences." Graduate students who have yet to select an area of specialization should find the broad coverage an aid to this end. Sophisticated researchers who wish to learn more about a particular area of human information processing sufficiently removed from their own speciality that obtaining this information from a search of the literature might prove tedious should also find this volume helpful. Both groups should benefit from the heavy emphasis on methodology that is present throughout the volume. Thus, this book should protect the researcher who is new to an area or an approach from repeating some of the errors that have been noted by the authors. The first chapter, "Human Perceptual-Motor Performance" by Richard W. Pew, addresses first the properties and performance of rather mechanistic and "simple-minded error-correction systems." Issues such as the tracking of random signals and a simple model of compensatory tracking are discussed and examined critically and incisively. This develops naturally into a treatment of the relationship between discrete and continuous models of tracking performance. Finally, various higher-order mechanisms in tracking are then offered, sources of signal predictability are outlined, and sine-wave tracking is given as an example, with the overall analysis described in terms of the 'block diagram' that by now is all too familiar. Approximately midway through Pew's treatment, his concern shifts from tracking performance per se to a deep and fundamental understanding of the acquisition and performance of so-called voluntary movements. Perhaps Pew's most penetrating analysis of these issues is of the different roles played by memory in tracking performance versus voluntary movement. His discussion of motor memory is highly illuminating, and his discussion of schema learning as introduced by Bartlett and its relation to problems of motor memory is exceptional. Pew's overall analysis results in another block diagram that summarizes his thinking on 'voluntary' motor control. He concludes that "while a great deal of detail remains to be worked out, the main thrust of this chapter is that there is nothing incompatible among the representations of inner-loop control, higher-order tracking control, and the formulation and execution of so-called voluntary movements" (p. 36). Chapter 2, "The Interpretation of Reaction Time in Information-Processing Research" by Robert G. Pachella, is not only exceedingly timely but an excep695
680 citations