Guidelines for the Design of an Airline Crew Control Operations Monitor

Abstract

The purpose of this master thesis was to examine the usability of an Operations Monitor for crew controllers at an airline. The comprehensive question of issue was how the Operations Monitor should be designed in appearance, interaction and functionality to support the users in an airlines operations control room. The background to the purpose is a EU-project called Descartes using development computerized optimisation techniques for the operation control. Within Descartes there is an interest in investigating in different visualization techniques, and in new methods of working for crew controllers. The thesis part in this project is to enlighten problems in designing for airline operation controllers, and to show what the consequences of the different design choices can have for the interaction. Different phases of user centred system development has been used in the process, some of these are user analysis, task analysis and prototyping, all founded upon methodology from contextual design. Three visits have been paid to the users and a lot of the work has been performed in the users work context. Workshops have been held with expert groups, and four prototypes have been derived from this, three of which have been implemented. End users have evaluated these and the result was analysed in relation to previous research within this area. This resulted in design recommendations, formulated from a user perspective. The purpose of the design recommendations was to be the foundation for the next step in the iterative development process. The comprehensive questions for the thesis was finally answered derived from the design recommendations