This paper describes the status and preliminary results of an ongoing research project to develop and validate user interface design guidelines for expert troubleshooting systems (ETS). The project, which is sponsored by the Systems Technology Branch of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, is part of a larger research program to study the application of emerging user interface technologies to the design and development of user interfaces for Space Station-era systems. The project has two separate research thrusts. The first and central thrust is to develop and validate a set of human engineering guidelines for designing the user interface of an ETS. The second thrust is to design and implement an electronic data base to manage storage and retrieval of the guidelines. This paper discusses the human factors issues that are unique to the design of a user interface for an ETS. This paper is not intended to address the breadth of research that has been conducted on human-computer interaction with conventional systems. This topic is well-represented in established human engineering principles, criteria and practices as desribed in the literature (e.g., Hendricks, et al, 1982;Norman, et al, 1983; Smith and Mosier, 1985;Norman and Draper, 1986; etc.). PROJECT OVERVIEWSpace Station-era systems will pose unique problems for designers of the user interface. Systems developed to support telescience (ie., to command, control and monitor on-orbit instruments and resources from groundbased workstations) will employ a variety of emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and wide area networks, which have received little or no formal human engineering analysis (Eike, et al., 1985). Recognizing this deficit, the Systems Technology Branch of Goddard Space Flight Center has instituted a program to identify and describe user interface requirements associated with advanced technologies. One area of study currently being pursued under this program is the design of user interfaces for expert troubleshooting systems. An expert troubleshooting system (ETS) is an automated system which employs real-time data, heuristics and rules of logic to detect, isolate and diagnose system failures, and to recommend corrective actions. These systems, which have been successfully employed in a variety of medical and industrial applications, have been identified as necessary to augment human decision-making capabilities in the complex, dynamic environment of the Space Station.The ETS user interface guidelines are being developed based on a review of the literature in three distinct areas: expert systems, automated troubleshooting and user interface design. Relevant research is being abstracted and then translated into user interface design guidelines. In order to ensure that the guidelines are both accurate from a human engineering standpoint and responsive to requirements of ETS designers, the project includes a separate validation phase.This phase involves application of the guidelines to the design and development of the user interface of ...

Introduction:Five studies examined the speech to song illusion, the verbal transformation effect, and the sound to music illusion in order to determine if they were distinct phenomena and to assess if they could be accounted for by a single perceptual/cognitive mechanism. Methods:In Study 1, word lists varying in length from 1 word (as often used to study the verbal transformation effect) to 4 words (as often used to study the speech to song illusion) were presented to participants for 4 minutes to investigate the percepts that were elicited. In Study 2 participants were asked to indicate YES/NO if they experienced the speech to song illusion when listening to word-lists modified by a vocoder. In Studies 3-5 participants were asked to click a button as soon as the shift in percept occurred from speech (or sound) to a music-like percept to assess the time-course of the speech to song (or sound to music) illusion.Results: Study 1 shows that the verbal transformation effect and the speech to song illusion elicit similar percepts. In Study 2 participants indicated that the speech-like stimuli elicited the speech to song illusion more than the noise-like stimuli. In Studies 3-5 similar time-courses were observed for the speech to song illusion and the sound to music illusion.Discussion: Previous, single-mechanism accounts of the speech to song illusion are discussed, but none of them adequately account for all of the results presented here. A new model is proposed that appeals to both a perceptual/"lower-level" mechanism and a cognitive/"higherlevel" mechanism.

Research has revealed that the extent to which users will utilize an advice-giving expert system is dependent on the quality of the system's explanation facility (Woods, 1986). Independent researchers have attempted to explore alternative explanation concepts by designing and building separate systems to test explanation facility theory, These efforts have focused primarily on the computational aspects of expert system design, leaving many of the central issues concerning human requirements of explanation facilities unresolved. This paper presents results of an extensive literature review designed to identify and define specific human factors issues which must be addressed to determine guidelines or standards for explanation facility design. The work described in this paper is part of an ongoing research program to develop guidelines for developers and users of expert troubleshooting systems (ETS).