Emergency dispatchers must make complex life or death decisions under extreme time pressure. Using Ecological Task Analysis (ETA), a technique normally applied to aerospace human factors problems, a new display was designed that would better assist their decision making task. The major design constraints were identified to be the beat number and priority of incidents, available units, and the spatial relationship of the those units to the incident. Using these and other less formal factors, a GUI interface was designed and an evaluation was conducted at the Richmond, CA police dispatch center. The results suggest that the GUI display may reduce training times and increase situational awareness.
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