Applied Technical Systems Inc. — Department of Defense SBIR Phase I: A15-033

Description

Modern tactical environments exhibit a wide array of distributed cognition challenges, particularly with the proliferation of device types available to commanders and soldiers. The transition between desktop and handheld device profiles presents a difficult choice for application design, between costly custom development per-platform or scaling technologies that dont adequately address contextual and workflow changes. Commonly-used approaches such as responsive design are typically focused on ensuring content is formatted correctly across device types, without considering the fundamental changes in how users interact with these devices at varying scales. To solve these problems, a human-centered design approach is needed which ensures that a scalable user interface technology accounts for human cognitive limits such as working memory and attention, in addition to the details of a particular device class such as the information capacity of the display and the interactive elements available (mouse, touchscreen, etc.). The proposed Phase I research includes an assessment of the low-level controlling factors for human-computer interaction at varying scales, along with a survey of current technologies for cost-effective interface scaling. These inputs will be used to produce a unified design framework for scalable user experiences that enables applications to provide the most appropriate interface for the users context.