The objective of this effort is to identify and resolve some of the human factors issues of tactical symbology in the context of high resolution color raster displays such as those for upcoming navy workstations. The focus of this presentation is the establishment of evaluation criteria and the use of empirical data in that evaluation process. A pilot test was devised and administered to provide data in determining the relative effectiveness of three alternative tactical symbol sets that had been developed by members of an international standards group. This paper discusses the methods and results of this pilot test, and based on those results, an experiment was developed to further test the competing symbol sets. Results of the experiment are presented in the context of naval tactical symbol sets.