Guidelines for the Design of an Airline Crew Control Operations Monitor

The purpose of this master thesis was to examine the usability of an Operations Monitor for crew controllers at an airline. The comprehensive question of issue was how the Operations Monitor should be designed in appearance, interaction and functionality to support the users in an airlines operations control room. The background to the purpose is a EU-project called Descartes using development computerized optimisation techniques for the operation control. Within Descartes there is an interest in investigating in different visualization techniques, and in new methods of working for crew controllers. The thesis part in this project is to enlighten problems in designing for airline operation controllers, and to show what the consequences of the different design choices can have for the interaction. Different phases of user centred system development has been used in the process, some of these are user analysis, task analysis and prototyping, all founded upon methodology from contextual design. Three visits have been paid to the users and a lot of the work has been performed in the users work context. Workshops have been held with expert groups, and four prototypes have been derived from this, three of which have been implemented. End users have evaluated these and the result was analysed in relation to previous research within this area. This resulted in design recommendations, formulated from a user perspective. The purpose of the design recommendations was to be the foundation for the next step in the iterative development process. The comprehensive questions for the thesis was finally answered derived from the design recommendations. Guidelines for the Design of an Airline Crew Control Operations Monitor Master Thesis Report 4 SAMMANFATTNING Målet med denna magisteruppsats har varit att undersöka användbarheten av en Operations Monitor för besättningsövervakare på ett flygbolag. Den övergripande frågan har varit hur Operations Monitor borde utformas till utseende, interaktion och funktionalitet för att stödja användarna i ett flygbolags kontrollrum. Bakgrunden till syftet är ett EU-projekt, Descartes, som använder utvecklade datoroptimeringstekniker för kontrollrumsmiljö. I Descartes finns ett intresse att undersöka olika visualiseringstekniker och nya arbetsmetoder för besättningsövervakare. I Descartes syftar denna magisteruppsats till att uppenbara problem i att designa för flygbolags verksamhetsövervakare och att visa vad konsekvenserna av de olika designvalen kan ha för interaktionen. Olika faser av användarcentrerad systemutveckling har använts i processen, några av dessa är användaranalys, uppgiftsanalys och prototyper, vilka grundats på metodik från kontextbaserad design. Det har gjorts tre besök hos användarna och mycket av arbetet har utförts i användarnas kontext. Det har dessutom hållits workshops med expertgrupper. Fyra prototyper har härletts ur dessa faser, av vilka tre har implementerats. Slutanvändarna har utvärderat dessa och resultatet har analyserats i relation till tidigare forskning inom detta område. Detta har resulterat i designrekommendationer, formulerade ur ett användarperspektiv. Syftet med designrekommendationerna var att bli nästa steg i den iterativa utvecklingsprocessen. De övergripande frågorna för uppsatsen besvarades slutligen utifrån designrekommendationerna. Guidelines for the Design of an Airline Crew Control Operations Monitor Master Thesis Report 5 PREFACE This paper is a master thesis report in Computer Human Interaction/Interaction Design, written for the IT-University of Gothenburg, being a part of Chalmers University of Technology. The master thesis was carried out by Eva Eriksson and Daniel Lindros at Carmen Systems AB, Gothenburg. We would like to thank our supervisors for their support; at Carmen Systems Dan Ryrlén served as our supervisor and at the IT-University Maria Redström was assigned as our supervisor. Thanks also to Carmen Systems for believing in us and giving us a chance to show what we could contribute to in the industry, and for giving us a place to sit. We are most grateful to the Descartes team, for their support and patience, and especially the project manager Sergey Tiourine, for his attention and time spent to help us. Throughout this work we have gained help, ideas and feedback from a lot of people worth mentioning, above all, our teachers at the IT-University; Staffan Björk, Christina von Dorrien, Lars Hallnäs, Peter Ljungstrand and Johan Redström. Our fellow classmates have also contributed with a lot of feedback, and showing a great deal of interest to our work, especially Charlotte Axelsson and Marie Mattsson, who have truly been there for us during our moments of despair. This master thesis would not have been able to be completed if it wasn’t for the friendly people at British Airways, especially Jamie Hobbs, as well as the people we met at KLM.