Håkan Alm

How to increase safety in complex systems – an ongoing project

The aim of this paper is to describe an ongoing project with the aim of improving safety in an organization working with maintenance and development of the railway infrastructure in Sweden. The first sub goal was to investigate the General Failure Types in the organization. Seminars and interviews, based on the Tripod Delta method, with 62 employees resulted in a description of these latent errors in the organization. Recommendations for an improvement toward a safety culture was suggested, action plans were formulated and, in some cases, implemented. A follow up study is planned in a two year perspective.

Usability and decision support systems in emergency management

The actors in charge of an emergency response are confronted with severe difficulties in coordination and decision making, especially in major accidents. To facilitate coordination, various decision support systems (DSS) integrated in communication systems have been developed. However, many DSS in the rescue service organizations are afflicted with under-use and other usability problems. Drawing on both a literature review and an analysis of recently obtained survey data from rescue personnel concerning usability of common communication system in Swedish emergency organizations, this paper addresses the issue of usability of DSS. It is concluded that the impetus for developing DSS in many cases has been the technological possibilities per se, not taking the decision makers task structure and contextual factors into account. It is argued that priority should be given to functions that provide a visual overview of the event and facilitate storing of the series of decisions made during the response.

Communicating the realization process during technology implementation

New technology implies improved efficiency. This potential is not always realized. It has been observed that implementation of new technology within Small and Medium-sized Enterprises, (SMEs), is not as widely spread as it could be. There are several likely grounds for this, e.g. difficulties to keep up to date on the latest technology, financial grounds due to expensive technology and uncertainty regarding what gain one would get from the new technology. Looking at technology implementation, a major part of the failed implementation attempts are caused by non-technological reasons, such as organizational and human reasons. Visualizing the expected result and also the implementation process to the SME prior to the actual implementation, the communication is much more direct and the actions the SME has to perform before, during and after the implementation is made clear. When implementing new technology, the information process is crucial. This paper discusses the value of communicating the entire process and the results thereof when evaluating a technology for eventual implementation. The results is viewed in two ways, first the realization of the products whether they meet the needs of the companies or not, second the actual realization process is developed and analysed to suit each company.

The alarm system and a possible way forward

The aim of this paper is to make a review of studies concerning problems with alarm systems and to make a theoretical analysis of these problems. The aim is also to show some general design ideas to improve alarm presentation in process descriptions. Using research results from situation awareness and decision making a number of suggestions for further development of alarm systems are presented. Recommendations include providing operators of complex systems feedback that can support their mental models and situational awareness. Furthermore a recommendation is to design alarm systems that can learn from experience.

Fitts’ law to the rescue: A comparison of graph tables

In this paper we investigate image browsing as an interactive method for visualizing line graphs. We have compared two interfaces that both presented exactly identically looking tables, but while one version was an overview+detail interface, the other one was a distortion-oriented interface of bifocal type. We expected there to be no difference in task completion times, and found none in our first statistical evaluation. Users preferred the static overview+detail interface to the distortion-oriented, which was motivated by complaints about the changed appearance of the distortion-oriented table. The empirical results were compared to theoretical results obtained using Fitts’ law, which showed a difference in task completion time for a certain task type. A second statistical analysis included only data from task type for which a difference could be expected. The new results supported the theoretical model, saying that users were faster with the overview+detail interface. In this paper we discuss problems with image browsing tests, and suggest some ideas for future research topics and designs.