Case Study - Designing An Advanced Visualization System for Geological Core Drilling Expeditions

April 10th, 2010

Categories: Applications, Human Factors, MS / PhD Thesis, Software, User Groups, Visualization

CoreWall User Interface Screen Shot
CoreWall User Interface Screen Shot

Authors

Chen, Y., Hur, H., Lee, S., Leigh, J., Johnson, A., Renambot, L.

About

We present the design and process of an interactive high-resolution visualization system for diverse and distributed real-world geological core drilling expeditions. The high domain knowledge barrier makes it difficult for a person who is outside this field to imagine the user experience, and the globally distributed core drilling community imposes more design constraints in space and time. In addition to activities proposed in prior literatures, we used the “immersive empathic design” approach of having a computer scientist trained as a junior core technician. Through in-situ observation and interview evaluations from on-going expeditions, we present the system and the lesson learned in the process. It makes the best use of precious co-located opportunities. It allows the developer to build up domain knowledge efficiently. It establishes a trust relationship between the developer and scientists. The system designed through this approach formed a sustainable foundation that was adapted in the following design iterations. This process allows the software developer to experience authentic user activities. The designed system is innovative and helps scientists solving real-world problems. This approach can be a useful example to HCI practitioners who work with potential users or communities that share similar properties.

Keywords: HCI, Visualization, Empathic Design

ACM Classification Keywords: H.5.3 [Information Interfaces and Presentation]: Group and Organization Interfaces - Computer-supported cooperative work, Synchronous interaction, Collaborative computing

General Terms Design, Human Factors

Resources

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Citation

Chen, Y., Hur, H., Lee, S., Leigh, J., Johnson, A., Renambot, L., Case Study - Designing An Advanced Visualization System for Geological Core Drilling Expeditions, Proceedings of the ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2010 (CHI 2010), Atlanta, GA, April 10th, 2010.