Abstract
This paper examines the effect of interface design on participants' adaptation with experience using a process control microworld. The experiment was conducted using DURESS II, an interactive thermal-hydraulic simulation with two interfaces: traditional (including only physical information) and ecological (including both physical and functional information). The experiment was 6 months in duration and included a variety of conditions. A group of early and late startup trials were analyzed in detail in order to investigate changes in expertise. Previously, trial completion time (or steady state time) has been used as the primary measure of performance on normal trials. In this paper, a series of additional measures were developed. These measures included: action transition graph complexity, path length in state space, deviation from the temperature goal line in mass versus energy inventory graphs, and proportion of early control actions on timelines. These performance measures revealed larger magnitude performance improvements in the ecological interface group.
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