[Sigia-l] The CogTool Project

[Peter Jones]

Simulations are valuable for what they are useful for. ACT-R and other
cognitive process simulations are designed for modeling interactions in
extremely complex, decision-leveraged, real-time environments that have to
be constructed with millions of tax dollars in mission-critical problem
areas. Nuclear and other power plant control stations. Industrial process
control. Logistics coordination. Air traffic control. Cognitive process
simulations let "designers" (often called engineers by the way) of these
systems help understand the relationships of decision impact, timing, and
planned and spurious events in the control space and in the uncontrolled
environment. Call it sophisticated scenario design.

And there are many, many formulations of "design." Not everything is a
product or meant to be on the web, or a visualization of data for a single
user. While practitioners in the different design disciplines argue
incessantly over the distinctions and differences of UI design, IA, ID, IxD,
UX Design, etc. these are all fairly similar. Compared to architecture,
process engineering, or control systems design, which are design, we are
just fussing with terms.

Peter Jones
Redesign Research
Dayton - Toronto
Http://redesignresearch.com


Cc: SIGIA-L
Subject: Re: [Sigia-l] The CogTool Project


While it would definitely be great to discover how experienced users will
interact with a system simply by running a simulation, tools such as GOMS
and ACT don't tell us *how* users will behave -- they only predict
performance data based on existing predictions+assumptions about what the
users will do.

If you tell it actions, it will tell you ideal task time.

Personally, I believe this makes it useful for the same sorts of situations
where a "classic" usability test with a specific, predefined task and a
stopwatch is useful: demonstrating the potential for improvement to project
stakeholders. For actually delivering improvement, however, I'd say it's
largely irrelevant, as it can't provide any insight or information beyond
the number of seconds expected for an expert user to complete a
specifically-delineated task
-- and we all know how easily-misinterpreted and -misused that data can be.

Disclaimer: I haven't used this specific tool, although as near as I can
tell, it seems to just be a GUI sitting on top of an existing model....
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Steven Pautz
Graduate Student
Human Factors Psychology, Clemson University