Prototyping and Usability Testing of Supervisory Control Interfaces for Life Science Automation

The objectives of this study were to (1) prototype enhanced human-machine interfaces for supervisory control of high-throughput biological screening (HTS) operations, (2) conduct usability evaluations of the prototypes and make comparisons with existing interfaces, and (3) demonstrate the plausibility of using computational cognitive models for such evaluations through comparison with the human test results. Task completion times were recorded during human and cognitive model trials with the HTS interfaces in two scenarios. GOMSL (Goals, Operators, Methods, and Selection rules Language) models were constructed based on cognitive task analyses. Usability tests revealed improvements in performance with new prototypes. The cognitive models also proved predictive of actual human performance and were considered valid for assessing the usability of two HTS task interfaces.