EMPIRICAL HUMAN-FACTORS INVESTIGATION OF DISPLAY DESIGN

The report discusses two experiments in which alphanumeric formats for aircraft flight information are compared. Both experiments utilized a nonintervention dynamic simulation of air traffic which has been called 'microsimulation.' The first experiment, performed with low traffic densities, indicated that altitude and climb-descent information could suitably be placed in tabular format if arranged in order of beacon altitude. In this experiment the target-associated identification always remained in the same position with respect to the target. In the second experiment, a tabular format similar to that of Experiment 1 was compared with a full three-line target-associated tag which was flipped to a new position (relative to the target) whenever overwrites were imminent. The only significant differences were related to the variances of conflictions called by the controller subjects, with the tag format yielding larger variabilities than the tabular format. It is suggested that since this tends to cause unnecessary control actions, the tabular format is at least not inferior to the tag format when traffic densities are high as in this experiment. (Author)