Naturalistic Decision Making: Implications for Design

Recent years have witnessed strong progress in understanding how people make decisions in operational settings. The emerging field of Naturalistic Decision Making NDM is at a point to afford system developers including design engineers, human factors engineers, ergonomics specialists different tools and methods for designing interfacessystems that will better support decision making in those settings. Decision requirements can be identified from the early conceptual design phase through redesign. The NDM framework attempts to describe the way in which people handle difficult conditions within the context of the overall setting or task. This SOAR describes various decision strategies used by individuals and teams to assess a situation, diagnose a problem, and select a course of action. The impact of stress upon these strategies is also considered. To help understand what people are thinking as they perform difficult tasks, the procedures for conducting Cognitive Task Analyses to examine design requirements are also examined.