I think the understanding of human behavior with reference to his corresponding culture and society, is the foremost task to consider e.g. reading English left to right is a common human attribute, hence most of the interfaces has their logo and title in the left upper corner of the page.

Thanks for your answer. But I think that is common for every domain. My enquiry was about, is there any factors that is only to be tackled for the men on the sea (while designing interactive systems for them)?

If you design for the bridge, it might be helpful to consider that your system will just be one of many, and all of these systems compete for the crew's attention. There may be unforseen strategies to cope with the information overload that are hard to anticipate, such as becoming blind to certain types of frequent alarms.

@Martin Pielot, Thanks for nice answer. I was also thinking about this becoming blind to too many alarms. I think color codes used in maritime industries, lighting factors, etc can be an issue too.

The devices I am planning to work on are not for navigation or safety purpose. Rather for auxiliary services. Can you point me any work/paper about maritime work environment? Requirements? Etc? Any info will help. Thanks.

@Sarah Jane Pell, thanks. Yes, indeed there are some works done with ergonomics (for instance, work done in the department of US Coast guard, then US marine). However, very less is made public. There are some European (to be correct, Scandinavian) shipping industries working on Human-Computer Interaction for mariner (often named as MMI for mariners) but again, the industrial researchers are "shy" in publishing.

Thank you for your response.

Hi Nasim, I used to work at the German Naval Medical Institute some 15 years ago - so my view is a bit dated, and most of my work was classified. However, in terms of environmental factors, you always have (unsorted, incomplete list, numbers just for reference):

1) lighting conditions. Whenever people have to go outside, you want their vision to be dark-adapted. This has various implications for lighting conditions and screen color sets.

2) sleep deprivation. In all shift systems you have to deal with fatigued personnel; in addition you may have extreme workload during port phases.

3) boredom and monotony.

4) Socio-cultural factors, such as command hierarchies, group dynamics, a distinct group culture growing over time that may have very different values from those people might have at home.

5) interfering personal equipment, like gloves, cold protection, other protective clothing (e.g. leather in some engine rooms) etc.

6) varying climatic conditions - heat, wind (also indoors due to air conditioning), moisture.

7) The influence of motion is overrated, at least in large ships which move slowly enough to be considered stationary. You may have to consider kinetosis (seasickness), though, which has some specific effects. On small vessels, you also may have to consider the ship's rolling; angles of some 30° may not be uncommon.

As for observations, nothing beats going aboard. If you look into questionnaire or psychometric test studies, you'll need a trained interviewer to administer them. A colleague of mine got very useful results for hardware ergonomics by installing a surveillance camera in a control room (which requires everyone's agreement of course).

Hope this helps, ;-) Bernard

@Bernard Rummel, Thank you very much for the nicely compiled list. I have conducted number of contextual inquiries on ocean going vessels near the Baltic sea. I have same experience as you mentioned. One important point that you mentioned in point 4-socio-cultural factors, group dynamics was also mentioned by Hutchins in his popular theory on distributed cognition, right? I will give closer look later.

Yes, the problem I am also facing is a large number good research works are classified - I can hardy find some introductory work from Danish, German navy, US coast guard etc.

Thank you very much once again. And looking forward to future discussions :)

Best regards.

@Hannu Vanharanta, sounds really interesting. So, you have a metaphor for this. Would you mind to kindly share it with us/me? I am really curious. I have spent some time thinking of coming up with metaphor. (Well, I have actually come up with a mid-fidelity prototyping tool -- not finalized. Seems forgotten now)

I am not clear, how did you deal with consciousness, externalization, etc, are you referring me to consider 'Activity Theory' like tools?

Thank you very much, and looking forward to future discussion :)

Nasim

@Heiko Müller, Thank you. I have indeed communicated with Professor Stella Mills. Her work is really interesting. However, her focus was on fishing boat -- yacht.

I will check the work of Thomas Porathe. Thank you very much and please post if you find any of the shelf reference for user evaluation for interactive devices. I am sure there are, but I am a bit clueless about those industrial research. Thank you. Looking forward to future reference and discussions :)

I would add a point #8 to Bernards list ;-)... In some situations it could be important that it needs to be useable with one hand only. This should be tested for the right, and left hand. Not all function, but the 2 or 3 core ones.

Right you are, Gunter. One hand for the ship, one for the man ;-)