Developing Visualization Tools for the Design of Air Traffic Control Experiments

While there has been significant research in the development of visualization tools for users of technology, little attention has been paid to developing visualization tools for human factors researchers designing experiments. From a design of experiments perspective, it is difficult to design video game-like experiments like those in found in air traffic control research, because of the need to control potential confounds such as consistency of scenarios and possible practice effects. When designing scenarios, the state and consistency of initial conditions can critically affect the experiment's outcome and validity. In this paper, we discuss several tools and techniques that were developed to better visualize these initial conditions and easily export them to the interface software. The key features of these tools are that they are relatively simple to develop, straightforward and fast to use, provide a graphical interface for the experiment designer, and ultimately can reduce the total design time for each experiment. Visualization tools based on the same general principles can also be of value in other domains.