This research focuses on evaluating a user interface (UI) for an autonomous vehicle (AV) with the goal to determine the most suitable layout for persons with visual acuity loss. The testing procedure includes a Wizard of Oz AV for simulating an automated ride. Several participants are included in the study and the visual impairments are simulated by specially designed glasses. The conclusions help to determine the optimal graphic design of the UI that can be independently used by persons with blurred vision. The results can be applied to improve the inclusiveness and ergonomics of vehicle UIs.

This article presents research on how frequently seafarers utilise functions and information available on an Integrated Navigation System to perform navigation duties. Using an online questionnaire, the study collected data from 601 members of the global seafaring community. The results provide an overview of the frequency of use for each feature, together with factors affecting the use and associated usability issues. The study finds that the use of navigation equipment is situation-dependent and affected by administrative factors, experience and professional habits, characteristics of the sailing area, traffic conditions, weather conditions, ship management factors and geographical location. Additionally, information overload, particularly with overlay and alert management functions, was found to be the major issue with existing systems. The findings of this study can be applied to improve menu tree structure, display layout, and interaction methods on the interface of navigation systems, such as making frequently-used features more readily available or easier to access.

The Arable Area Payments Scheme of the European Union has been in operation since 1992, paying farmers to set aside a portion of their arable land from production for 1 to 5 yr. Management of the land is prescribed, both in terms of timing and type. The scheme is potentially beneficial to the environment, as set-aside land can be used to improve bird, mammal, and insect habitats. However, environmental and agronomic objectives frequently conflict, particularly in the area of weed management. To predict weed growth and succession, a tool was required to model vegetation at set-aside sites using the key environmental factors, location, and soil that could account for differences in the weed species likely to be invasive. To this end, a Geographical Information System has been developed that links modeled species distributions to a model of successional change. The system has a simple menu structure allowing speedy manipulation of the data and models to predict the effects of management on the weed communities at known geographical locations.

Complex systems are challenging to design, particularly when they contain multi-level organizations with non-obvious relationships among design components. Here, we investigate engineering students’ capacity to search for optimal nanoscale biosystem designs with stochastic component and system behaviors. The study aims to characterize information types that facilitate human learning and improve their complex system understanding and design proficiency. It is hypothesized that learning parametric system relationships and/or inter-level causal mechanisms improves design proficiency; these relationships and mechanisms are teachable through software interfaces. Two contrasting learning/design interfaces were developed that presented differing information types: an interface with performance charts that emphasized parametric relationship learning and an interface with agent-based animations that emphasized inter-level causality learning. Users improved on pre-/post-learning design tasks with both interfaces; users who demonstrated inter-level causal relationship understanding, which occurred primarily with the animation interface, had greater improvement. All users were then presented contrasting animations of systems with opposing emergent behaviors, resulting in many more participants demonstrating an understanding of inter-level causal behaviors. These findings reveal the difficulties in understanding and designing multi-level systems and that interactive software tools may convey crucial information that supports engineering design, particularly with respect to the development of reasoning skills for how system components relate across levels.

The concept of shape grammars has often been proposed to improve or support creative design processes. Shape grammar implementations have the potential to both automate parts of the design process and allow exploration of design alternatives. In many of the existing implementations, the main focus is either on capturing the rationale of a particular existing grammar or on allowing designers to develop a new grammar. However, little attention is typically given to the actual representation of the design space that can be explored in the interface of the implementation. With such representation, a shape grammar implementation could properly support designers who are still in the process of designing and may not yet have a clear shape grammar in mind. In this article, an approach and a proof-of-concept software system is proposed for a shape grammar implementation that provides a visual and interactive way to support design space exploration in a creative design process. We describe the method by which this software system can be used and focus on how designers can interact with the exploration process. In particular, we point out how the proposed approach realizes several important amplification strategies to support design space exploration.

The two main ways to search for information in electronic document collections are by using free-text retrieval search engines or browsing information that has been organized into predefined organizational structures. However, each of these approaches has limitations. Using word or phrase search, users are faced with a compromise between overly broad searches returning an excessive amount of information or overly narrow searches that may fail to return relevant information. Browsing organizational structures is dependent on the user's knowledge of the structures, and a user may find it difficult to refine searches. This paper introduces a user interface based approach to the browsing of hierarchically organized information entities that avoids these problems by allowing the incremental narrowing down of a set of search results and by pruning the organizational structure after each user selection to show the consequences of the selection. The effect is to present to the user at all times only that part of the organizational structure that will lead to a nonnull selection. The approach is called no zero match (NZM) browsing. The paper presents the computational basis of NZM browsing before describing a trial implementation of the approach and presenting three case studies, which represent common search situations in an engineering context.