Tool-supported comparative visualizations to reveal the difference between ‘what has been designed’ and ‘how it is perceived’ for monitoring interface design

Monitoring is one of the most important tasks for an operator of a complex safety-critical system like a ship bridge or air traffic control. It is a prerequisite for good situation awareness. Designing an interface for such environments requires optimizing what is presented to the most limited resource: the operator's visual attention. But the real operator's attention distribution is hard to anticipate for a designer. We apply cognitive attention prediction methods to predict attention based on information gained on the one hand by the HMI designer and on the other hand the future user of an HMI. This contribution proposes and evaluates a set of comparative visualizations that support elaborating the differences between what has been designed and how it is perceived. An initial study indicated that a visually supported comparative analysis supports a designer in identifying differences and also seems to stimulate the designer to reason about the design.