A Study of Ergonomic Measurement Indices in Evaluating Human-Machine Interfaces

Measurement and evaluation of a human-machine interface is a difficult yet very important issue. The difficulty lies in that the issue is inherently a very subjective, and the importance is that the evaluation is part of design process for systems development. The purpose of evaluation is to see how an interface affects the operation of a human-machine control system in two aspects: the operator's mental workload and the performance in completing tasks. In this paper primarily the eye behaviors measure is discussed, together with some other measures, for evaluating two interface design frameworks: Ecological Interface Design (EID) and Function Behavior State (FBS). The measures we used cover both the measure for mental workload and the measure for performance. It is observed through the experiment that these measures vary in different degrees of sensitivity to the hypothesis under investigation and are sometimes in conflict. This has given a motivation for a further study on a new issue called ‘measure fusion’. This further study is briefly discussed.