Evidence Report: Risk of Inadequate Human-Computer Interaction

Human-computer interaction (HCI) encompasses all the methods by which humans and computer-based systems communicate, share information, and accomplish tasks. When HCI is poorly designed, crews have difficulty entering, navigating, accessing, and understanding information. HCI has rarely been studied in an operational spaceflight context, and detailed performance data that would support evaluation of HCI have not been collected; thus, we draw much of our evidence from post-spaceflight crew comments, and from other safety-critical domains like ground-based power plants, and aviation. Additionally, there is a concern that any potential or real issues to date may have been masked by the fact that crews have near constant access to ground controllers, who monitor for errors, correct mistakes, and provide additional information needed to complete tasks. We do not know what types of HCI issues might arise without this "safety net". Exploration missions will test this concern, as crews may be operating autonomously due to communication delays and blackouts. Crew survival will be heavily dependent on available electronic information for just-in-time training, procedure execution, and vehicle or system maintenance; hence, the criticality of the Risk of Inadequate HCI. Future work must focus on identifying the most important contributing risk factors, evaluating their contribution to the overall risk, and developing appropriate mitigations. The Risk of Inadequate HCI includes eight core contributing factors based on the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS): (1) Requirements, policies, and design processes, (2) Information resources and support, (3) Allocation of attention, (4) Cognitive overload, (5) Environmentally induced perceptual changes, (6) Misperception and misinterpretation of displayed information, (7) Spatial disorientation, and (8) Displays and controls.