Designing user friendly Situational Awareness products

Situational Awareness (SA), Electronic Order of Battle (EOB), and Common Operating Picture (COP) are all terms used to describe getting real-time tactical information into the hands of the warfighter. This information has to be part of a complete on-going process which includes premission planning and in-transit updates via an effective military communications network. This is especially critical in the modem era of rapid, long-range military deployments. In order to field Situational Awareness systems in a fairly quick time period (in a matter of months as opposed to the traditional multi-year military system development cycle) many military systems integrators have opted to go the route of quickly integrating various Commercial Off The Shelf (COTS) hardware and software components into what can be best described as kludged Situational Awareness solutions. These solutions typically have been fielded as disparate, stand-alone systems which require the user to carry multiple devices, or attempt to run multiple applications in a highly complex Windows based desktop environment. Most of these solutions are mouse intensive applications which do not readily lend themselves to an austere military environment. In order to develop effective Situational Awareness systems, Systems and Software Engineering efforts need to be better focused on taking existing COTS components and building simple and easy to use interfaces around them. This paper will discuss human systems interface issues that Raytheon encountered in the design and development of Situational Awareness solutions for various military applications. In addition, this paper will also discuss several design guidelines for Situational Awareness solutions based on lessons learned from Raytheon´s successful development and deployment of easy-to-use Situational Awareness products