Technology users are technology observers as well, monitoring for problems or opportunities that might arise. Designing interfaces to support the monitoring of technology presents unique challenges for everything from detecting situations to responding to situations to changing the tools to match a changing operating environment or the observer's changing knowledge. An interface needed to overcome these challenges, and the process of designing such an interface must take all of these challenges into consideration. I present "heed": a scale and framework to help observers of a system evaluate which situations need scrutiny and when, along with an example heed-based interface that encourages the development of situation awareness. By presenting the importance of attending to each situation on a scale instead of in a binary state, observers are able to classify which situations need their attention and which can be safely ignored, and by presenting how that importance is changing, they can estimate if a situation might need their attention soon. The heed framework makes it possible for observers to describe situations in terms of a rich set of conditions and logical operators, and the interface enables them to refine their descriptions and perceive the importance of attending each situation. I discuss how the framework and interface can be applied to the monitoring of four very different situations: server performance, a business's finances, user experience in a community forum, and the risk of disease outbreak at a veterinary clinic, and how these examples can be generalized to guide the application of heed to many other situations.

Last modified

• 09/20/2018

Creator

• Conrad Albrecht-Buehler

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2S435

Subject

• Computer Science

Keyword

• Gizmometer
• Human-Computer Interaction
• Fuzzy Logic
• Heed
• Monitoring
• Situation Awareness

Date created

• 2008-12-03

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright