Designing Dashboards for Situation Awareness

January 21, 2009 Dashboards 1 Comment

The level of awareness an individual has for a situation – of knowing what is going on at any one time and how it fits into or impacts the overall system. Effective dashboards increase situational awareness but the danger of fixation on the measure, rather than the meaning and impact can overwhelm the advantage to sometimes disasterous results.

A well documented case by Endsley, Bolte and Jones [2003] tells of how a myopic focus on monitoring resulted in an airplane being flown into a mountain side whilst pilots argued about the cause of a flashing light. In fact 88% of human error in aircraft crashes are the result of poor situational awareness. The other 12% is through poor decision making or poor execution. Whilst the pilots were seen to do their job correctly, they were unable to readily access the information behind the dashboard indication.

Yet little attention is given to ensuring that situational awareness is a factor in dashboard design and integration of such BI tools into processes. The primary reasons given for this are:

  • Executive dashboards are too generic and role specific to benefit from SA based development
  • Operational dashboards are too costly to develop incorporating iterative SA practices

However, 50 SA dashboard design guidelines have been developed by Endsley, divided into 6 categories:

  1. Organize information around goals – for instance, with pilots, the amount of gas is not important in itself, but in terms of ability to reach the destination with required fuel reserves and below landing fuel weight, based on the current environmental conditions is what is important to the pilot.
  2. Directly support comprehension – indicate relative importance of different measures, their target values and deviation parameters
  3. Support global SA – specific goals should be viewed in context of the overall picture
  4. Context driven alerts – only include threshold alerts where important for the current task
  5. Make context changes apparent – alerts received must be done in a context that provides awareness of a new situation
  6. Use projections – trend information helps users create a mental model of future behavior

Two other factors that impact SA when using dashboards are the users confidence in the data viewed and the complexity of the design of the dashboard. For more on BI Dashboards