Collaboration with Ecological Interface Design

Abstract

Ecological Interface Design (EID) has been shown to be an effective design approach for building single-operator interfaces for complex systems. However, in such systems, operators typically are also a part of a team. An experiment was conducted to examine the effect of EID on collaboration. Teams of two operated a feed water simulator, DURESSj, through a series of scenarios given either the EID interface or the Non-EID interface. It was found that there was no penalty to using EID, as scenario completion times with the EID interface were equivalent to the Non-EID interface. Indeed, EID operators demonstrated evidence of more robust control and reported significantly lower mental workload especially when dealing with system faults.