Survey

Human-System Interaction (HSI) is the study of interfaces between humans and technical systems. The Department of Defense incorporates HSI evaluations into defense acquisition to improve system performance and reduce lifecycle costs. During operational test and evaluation, HSI evaluations characterize how a system’s operational performance is affected by its users. The goal of this course is to provide the theoretical background and practical tools necessary to plan and evaluate HSI test plans, collect and analyze HSI data, and report on HSI results....

In the acquisition and testing world, data analysts repeatedly encounter certain categories of data, such as time or distance until an event (e.g., failure, alert, detection), binary outcomes (e.g., success/failure, hit/miss), and survey responses. Analysts need tools that enable them to produce quality and timely analyses of the data they acquire during testing. This poster presents four web-based apps that can analyze these types of data. The apps are designed to assist analysts and researchers with simple repeatable analysis tasks, such as building summary tables and plots for reports or briefings....

Effective training of the broad set of users/operators of systems has downstream impacts on usability, workload, and ultimate system performance that are related to mission success. In order to measure training effectiveness, we designed a survey called the Operational Assessment of Training Scale (OATS) in partnership with the Army Test and Evaluation Center (ATEC). Two subscales were designed to assess the degrees to which training covered relevant content for real operations (Relevance subscale) and enabled self-rated ability to interact with systems effectively after training (Efficacy subscale)....

Some responses cannot be observed directly and must be inferred from multiple indirect measurements, for example human experiences accessed through a variety of survey questions. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) is a data-driven method to optimally combine these indirect measurements to infer some number of unobserved factors. Ideally, EFA should identify how many unobserved factors the indirect measures help estimate (factor extraction), as well as accurately capture how well each indirect measure estimates each factor (parameter recovery)....

For situations in which an empirically vetted scale does not exist or is not suitable, a custom scale may be created. This document presents a comprehensive process for establishing the defensible use of a custom scale. At the highest level, this process encompasses (1) establishing validity of the scale, (2) establishing reliability of the scale, and (3) assessing dimensionality, whether intended or unintended, of the scale. First, the concept of validity is described, including how validity may be established using operators and subject matter experts....