The purpose of this master thesis was to examine the usability of an Operations Monitor
for crew controllers at an airline. The comprehensive question of issue was how the Operations
Monitor should be designed in appearance, interaction and functionality to support the users in
an airlines operations control room.
The purpose of the master thesis has its background in a EU-project called Descartes, which has been developing computerized
optimization techniques for the operation control. Within Descartes there is an interest of investigating
different visualization techniques, and new methods of working for crew controllers. The thesis part
in this project is to enlighten problems in designing for airline operation controllers, and to show what
the consequences of different design choices can have for the interaction.
Different phases of user centred system development has been used in the process, some of these are user analysis,
task analysis and prototyping, all founded upon methodology from contextual design. Three visits have been paid
to the users and a lot of the work has been performed in the users work context. Workshops have been held with
expert groups, and four prototypes have been derived from this, three of which have been implemented. End users
have evaluated these and the result was analysed in relation to previous research within this area. This resulted
in design recommendations, formulated from a user perspective.
The purpose of the design recommendations was to be the foundation for the next step in the iterative development
process. The stated questions for the thesis were finally answered derived from the design recommendations.