DAISY: a design methodology for experience-centered planning support systems

Designing systems to effectively assist planners in grasping the situation quickly and making high quality decisions is very difficult, even within a single problem solving domain. Different types of users have very different needs, and a system designed to assist one group of users may frustrate other users with differing amounts of experience. We present DAISY, a methodology for developing planning aids for users, given a specified level of expertise. This methodology is intended to enable system designers to identify the system requirements needed to meet the information and display needs of users at a given level of experience prior to designing the system. These requirements are identified through user problem solving studies and the development of a model of the task, the information requirements and the typical user errors. The DAISY methodology is unique in that it identifies the needs of planners at varying ranges of experience, and provides concrete methods for incorporating these specialized user needs into the software design. We illustrate the use of this methodology in the design of an intelligent agent and human-computer interface, Fox, for the military planning task of course of action generation. This is a complex and difficult decision making task in which users make life and death decisions while they are are under extreme time pressure and overloaded with information.