Paper Session II-D - Checkout and Launch Control System as a Case Study for Human Factors Education

The Checkout and Launch Control System (CLCS) Project is being used at FIU as a tool for improving the transmission of engineering education. This use has two goals. The first is to use exciting projects to inspire and motivate students in the pursuit of their engineering degrees. Excitement about education has been shown to captivate a greater percentage of a student’s attention, leading to better learning. The second is to enhance the visibility of NASA projects with future engineering professionals. This can lead to a more widespread appreciation of the needs of the aerospace industry within the general community of engineers. It may also encourage engineering students to pursue NASA related careers. CLCS-related units have been included at FIU in several ways. A major milestone of the CLCS project is an evaluation of four console workstation designs. This evaluation requires several detailed analyses to assess postures, productivity, and layout. In a Work Design and Ergonomics course, CLCS has been used as a case study through which to study these job evaluation methods. Another major initiative of the CLCS project is to evaluate the software development process in CLCS for the presence of user inclusion in the design operation. This involves working with users of the software systems in CLCS to gauge their requirements and expectations prior to software development and then involving those users in formal usability testing of the software throughout the design cycle. User inclusion from the perspective of CLCS is being used as a case study in a course called Cognitive Engineering in Human-Computer Interaction

Preference measurement for multistate health profiles

Issued as final repor

Analyzing universal design resource needs for practitioners in industry and government

Issued as final reportUnited States. Dept. of Educatio

Leveraging institutional partnerships and individual expertise to support translational science: an extension of the informationist model

In Fall 2009, the Health Sciences Libraries (HSL) and the Institute for Health Informatics (IHI) at the University of Minnesota jointly recruited a new position titled Translational Science Information Specialist and IHI-Library Fellow to serve as library liaison to the University’s Clinical and Translational Science Institute, to co-direct the graduate program in health informatics, and to leverage expertise to support University-wide initiatives in E-Science and data services. The position built on experience with and commitment to the concept of “informationist”. This paper reports the opportunities, challenges and evolving critical role of the Information Specialist as “curator” and “translator” of health data and information among many different organizational entities and community partners

Models for hierarchical menu design: Incorporating breadth and depth, task complexity, and knowledge structure of the user

The first objective of this dissertation research was to provide a theoretically meaningful link between the three constructs of hierarchical menu design: menu dimension, task complexity, and knowledge structure of the user. The second objective was to develop theoretically based, operational guidelines for the design of computerized menus for a variety of diversified work situations and user populations. To provide a solid foundation for the theoretically based guidelines, four hypotheses have been proposed and tested. Twenty-four subjects were utilized in a nested factorial experiment. The dependent variables were time to respond and errors committed. The independent variables were menu dimension, task complexity, and user knowledge structure. The foundation of Hypotheses One through Four was based upon the theory which indicated that when task complexity is low, the short-term memory requirements are low, and the level of abstraction of the user\u27s knowledge structure will not impact performance because it is not required for the chunking of visual information. Hypothesis One stated that in a low depth menu, with a low complexity task, knowledge structure will not impact performance. Hypothesis Two stated that in a high depth menu, with a low complexity task, knowledge structure will not impact performance. Hypothesis Three stated that in a high depth menu, with a high complexity task, knowledge structure will impact performance. Hypothesis Four stated that in a low depth menu, with a high complexity task, knowledge structure will impact performance. Hypotheses One, Three, and Four were supported. Hypothesis Two was supported in terms of errors only. Moreover, this research determined that the capability to discriminate between concepts in a domain produced the differences in performance. There was no evidence of manipulation of abstraction. A theoretically meaningful link between the three constructs of hierarchical menu design was identified. In addition, theoretically based, operational guidelines for the design of computerized menus for a variety of diversified work situations and user populations were developed. In this context, the information processing model for psychomotor tasks (Salvendy and Knight, 1982) has been modified to include three constructs: menu dimension, task complexity, and knowledge structure