Making Instructions Visible: Implications for Training and Interface Design

Abstract

Forcing operators to comply to a training method may increase workload in remembering instructions and deny opportunities for exploiting other strategies. A means for increasing learning flexibility would be to manipulate the design of the user interface in ways that prompt trainees to recall past instructions or develop their own strategies. An experimental study is described that manipulates the ratio of visible instructions on the interface to the expository (or verbal) instructions. A new interface has been tested that presented several “tale-tell” signs to help trainees discover diagnostic rules. A group of subjects T(new), that used the new interface, became more accurate in fault-diagnosis than another group T(old) that practised on a conventional panel; both groups were provided with the same technical story. On transfer to two other tasks, the T(new) group maintained a better performance to the T(old) group, but only for a subset of the fault scenarios; superior performance was also observed in relation to a third group trained in heuristics. Finally, the new interface enabled the T(new) group to achieve equivalent performance to a fourth group that received both a technical story and a set of heuristics but used the conventional panel.