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https://doi.org/10.18429/JACoW-ICALEPCS2017-THAPL03
Title Usability Recommendations for the SKA Control Room Obtained by a User-Centred Design Approach
Authors
  • V. Alberti
    INAF-OAT, Trieste, Italy
  • G. Brajnik
    IDS, Udine, Italy
Abstract User-Centered Design is a powerful approach for designing UIs that match and satisfy users' skills and expectations. Interviews, affinity diagrams, personas, usage scenarios are some of the fundamental tools for gathering and analysing relevant information. We applied these techniques to the development of the UI for the control room of the Square Kilometre Array (SKA) telescopes. We interviewed the personnel at two of the SKA precursors, LOFAR and MeerKAT, with the goal of understanding what features satisfy operators' needs and which ones can be improved. What was learned includes several usability issues dealing with fragmentation and low cohesiveness of the UIs, some gaps, and an excessive number of user actions needed to achieve certain goals. Low usability of the UI and the large scale of SKA are two challenges in developing its UI because they affect the extent to which operators can focus on important data, the likelihood of human errors and their consequences. This paper illustrates the followed method, provides examples of some of the artefacts that were produced and describes and motivates the resulting usability recommendations which are specific for SKA.
Funding INAF
Paper download THAPL03.PDF [0.249 MB / 7 pages]
Slides download THAPL03_TALK.PDF [1.017 MB]
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Conference ICALEPCS2017, Barcelona, Spain
Series International Conference on Accelerator and Large Experimental Control Systems (16th)
Proceedings Link to full ICALEPCS2017 Proccedings
Session User Interfaces and User eXperience (UX) 2
Date 12-Oct-17   09:30–10:45
Main Classification User Interfaces and User eXperience (UX)
Keywords ion, operation, interface, software, controls
Publisher JACoW, Geneva, Switzerland
Editors Volker RW Schaa (GSI, Darmstadt, Germany); Isidre Costa (ALBA-CELLS, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain); David Fernández (ALBA-CELLS, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain); Óscar Matilla (ALBA-CELLS, Cerdanyola del Vallès, Spain)
ISBN 978-3-95450-193-9
Published January 2018
Copyright
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cc Creative Commons Attribution 3.0