Paper
24 September 2012 Interaction design challenges and solutions for ALMA operations monitoring and control
Emmanuel Pietriga, Pierre Cubaud, Joseph Schwarz, Romain Primet, Marcus Schilling, Denis Barkats, Emilio Barrios, Baltasar Vila Vilaro
Author Affiliations +
Abstract
The ALMA radio-telescope, currently under construction in northern Chile, is a very advanced instrument that presents numerous challenges. From a software perspective, one critical issue is the design of graphical user interfaces for operations monitoring and control that scale to the complexity of the system and to the massive amounts of data users are faced with. Early experience operating the telescope with only a few antennas has shown that conventional user interface technologies are not adequate in this context. They consume too much screen real-estate, require many unnecessary interactions to access relevant information, and fail to provide operators and astronomers with a clear mental map of the instrument. They increase extraneous cognitive load, impeding tasks that call for quick diagnosis and action. To address this challenge, the ALMA software division adopted a user-centered design approach. For the last two years, astronomers, operators, software engineers and human-computer interaction researchers have been involved in participatory design workshops, with the aim of designing better user interfaces based on state-of-the-art visualization techniques. This paper describes the process that led to the development of those interface components and to a proposal for the science and operations console setup: brainstorming sessions, rapid prototyping, joint implementation work involving software engineers and human-computer interaction researchers, feedback collection from a broader range of users, further iterations and testing.
© (2012) COPYRIGHT Society of Photo-Optical Instrumentation Engineers (SPIE). Downloading of the abstract is permitted for personal use only.
Emmanuel Pietriga, Pierre Cubaud, Joseph Schwarz, Romain Primet, Marcus Schilling, Denis Barkats, Emilio Barrios, and Baltasar Vila Vilaro "Interaction design challenges and solutions for ALMA operations monitoring and control", Proc. SPIE 8451, Software and Cyberinfrastructure for Astronomy II, 845110 (24 September 2012); https://doi.org/10.1117/12.925180
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Cited by 7 scholarly publications.
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KEYWORDS
Antennas

Human-machine interfaces

Visualization

Human-computer interaction

Navigation systems

Software development

Control systems

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