Ecological Interface Design for a Water Monitoring Decision Aid

In joint human-automation systems, operators must often supervise the automation and adapt their reliance upon it based on judgments of its context-specific reliability. For this to occur, operators should trust the automation appropriately. In the design of a water monitoring decision aid’s display, Ecological Interface Design was used to satisfy design guidelines for supporting appropriate trust. Display evaluation focused on a graphic form that made the aid’s use of the Dempster-Shafer theory directly perceptible. The display was evaluated using a signal detection theory-based approach that measured reliance on automation. Results indicated that the ecological display yielded less appropriate reliance and poorer performance than a conventional display for a highly reliable decision aid. However, the experimental task prevented participants from adapting to the aid’s context-specific reliabilities, reducing the degree to which reliance behaviour could be studied. A subsequent study is proposed to further study the effects of ecological displays on automation reliance.