Overview

There and Back Again

When maintenance workers in the Navy need more information about equipment or a task, they must go to a large shelf with many thick manuals. Each bulky manual is printed in legal size. Maintenance workers often have another tech go through the manual while they are completing a task—to placehold information, to read aloud, or to find the appropriate diagram.

Our seven month project that began in January 2005 is to provide a better solution to support the work of these maintenance techs. The Navy, together with other branches of the military, have been working diligently to convert paper versions of technical documentation to electronic forms of documentation known as Interactive Electronic Technical Manuals (IETMs). This allows rudimentary interactive navigation with the technical manuals.

We propose a solution using a multimodal interface so that maintenance workers can access documentation easily and efficiently through these IETMs. Our foci of the project are navigation of text and diagrams using both a graphical user interface and a voice user interface.

Our design challenge included a number of constraints:

build for a ship environment where users may be near the radar system or inside the equipment room

endure different environments including bright sunlight, dark rooms, and noisy conditions

allow for current IETMs to be fed electronically into the system

target users may have had only high school education

target users may not be computer proficient beyond an Internet browser

limited screen resolution

tasks may require both hands and/or visual attention