Applying the User-Centered Design approach for Prototyping the Interfaces of an Intelligent Emergency Management System

• Autor(a) principal: Figueiredo, Diogo Alves
• Data de Publicação: 2019
• Tipo de documento: Dissertação
• Idioma: eng
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: http://hdl.handle.net/10362/95075
• topic: User-Centered Design; Cognitive Walkthrough; THEMIS; Disaster Management; Eye Tracking; Personas; Domínio/Área Científica::Engenharia e Tecnologia::Outras Engenharias e Tecnologias

In today’s disaster management context, decision-making and information management is a crucial aspect, given the complexity of the tasks the decision-maker has, as well as the sheer influx of information coming in at any given time. As such there is a need to develop a system that can aid both the decision makers in the command post but can also collect the information gathered by the responders on the field. This system should also aid the decision maker by providing counselling according a set of rules, giving the system an intelligent aspect. Thusly THEMIS is born, an intelligent system to support decision making in crisis scenarios. As any given system must have an interface, the usability and user experience are a concern, but given the nature of crisis scenarios, this aspect of user interfaces becomes much more critical. It is in this context that this dissertation’s goal becomes clear: design and test the interface prototype of an emergency management intelligent system, following the User-Centered Design framework. With this goal in mind, the steps of the framework were followed, by beginning to understand the user, the context of use, resulting in understanding the user’s needs. From here, the system requirements emerged, and paper prototyping began. After validation with experts and possible users, the interfaces were prototyped digitally for both the desktop and mobile system applications. This was followed by usability tests, using the Cognitive Walkthrough method, the System Usability Score and the User Experience Questionnaire. In order to complement the testing phase, eye tracking data was gathered during the desktop version’s usability tests, which gave further insight about user behaviour. As such, it was concluded that prototypes scored highly both for usability and user experience, and there was an overall improvement on the various versions of both the desktop and mobile apps. The tests with eye tracking also allowed to identify a few issues that otherwise couldn’t be detected, namely key items the users were missing on the interfaces.