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

by Mica R. Endsley

Enhancing Situation Awareness (SA) is a major design goal for projects in many fields, including aviation, ground transportation, air traffic control, nuclear power, and medicine, but little information exists in an integral format to support this goal.
Designing for Situation Awareness helps designers understand how people acquire and interpret information in complex settings and recognize the factors that undermine this process. Designing to support operator SA reduces the incidence of human error, which has been found to occur largely due to failures in SA. Whereas many previous human factors efforts have focused on design at the perceptual and surface feature level, SA-oriented design focuses on the operator's information needs and cognitive processes as they juggle to integrate information from many sources and achieve multiple competing goals. Thus it addresses design from a system's perspective.
By applying theoretical and empirical information on SA to the system design process, human factors practitioners can create designs to support SA across a wide variety of domains and design issues. This book serves as a helpful reference to that end.

Genres: Design

344 pages, Paperback

First published July 1, 2003

Reviews

[Griffin Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably the best introduction to the topic by the perhaps the world's leading scholar. Thoroughly organized and highly applicable (with some creativity).

[Shawn Hatton · Rating 4 out of 5]

interesting perspective

This book offered a well thought out approach to designing HMI screens for process control. I'm looking forward to applying the concepts of this book. My only complaint: the kindle version is not that great.