An Experimental Study on Radar and ARPA Switch Layout

摘要

Recently, many navigational instruments have adopted a menu display form. This menu display form sometime makes navigators confused and leads them to mistake and misunderstanding. IMO MSC64 (67) recommends adopting an ergonomics approach for the planning of a switch layout. Therefore, "usability", "reliability" and "reduction of the human errors and mental strain" should be accounted on the switch layout planning. In this paper, aiming at a "usability evaluation" of radar and ARPA the fieldworks on the inland sea ferryboats were carried out and some real switch usage results were recorded to videotapes. After these fieldworks, some comparable characteristics on switch usage in the daytime and nighttime or in navigation areas are found. At a result of these fieldworks, the usage frequencies of radar and ARPA are different in the daytime and nighttime or in navigation areas, but the usage rates have fairly similar tendencies each other. From these results, we propose one method for developing a user's model to evaluate the usability of radar and ARPA.