Tools for the Development of Systems for Human Factors Experiments: An Example for the SSA

For a period of two years, Bolt Beranek ar Newman Inc. (BBN) worked with the Social Security Administration (SSA) to develop tools to enable exploration of human factors issues in the on-line collection and manipulation of data which are collected during interviews with clients applying for social security benefits. As part of this project, BBN developed a Human Factors Test and Evaluation Facility (TEF), wrote several systems with which human factors experiments were performed in that facility, and also produced a set of on-line tools. These tools allowed SSA personnel to specify parts of the system such as definitions of the data to be collected (complex data types and structures), simple constraints which the data must satisfy, and presentation mechanisms (e.g., two-dimensional forms). The experiments that were conducted, the features of the on-line tools which allowed relatively naive users to specify the complex behavior of the systems used for the experiments, and certain features of those systems that were developed with human factors considerations in mind are discussed.