Project Description and Process

The Cognition Lab at NASA Ames Research Center, specifically the developers of the Apex Cognitive Modeling tool asked us to help them learn how to make human-performance modeling easier and apply this knowledge to improve their Apex modeling tool.

This project began in the Spring semester 2001 with a team of eleven Masters in HCI students. During this semester we engaged in Contextual Design to understand users and their work and identify breakdowns in the users' work process. We applied these insights to develop design solutions that resolve breakdowns and initial designs of tools to meet users' needs.

During the Summer semester, we split into two groups and each group pursued creation and refinement of a prototype to the selected designs. My group of five worked on a Trace Visualization Tool, which we dubbed "Vista." Throughout the summer we applied knowledge of interface design principles to develop working prototypes, which we tested with users. We had a weekly rapid prototyping schedule during which we refined our design based on the results and tested again.

Vista

We recognized that analyzing trace output generated from running an Apex model is difficult because: a huge amount of raw data is produce with every run, it's hard to anticipate what filter is needed beforehand, and information about a single task may be spread over the entire document. These difficulties also make it hard to answer specific questions, and even harder to explore the results.

Vista facilitated answering factual questions and performing exploratory analysis by:

• Making the model elements - Tasks, Resources and Simworld Objects, their relationships, and changes over time visually apparent
• Linking related information across views