This document discusses situational awareness, which refers to being aware of one's environment and understanding how information will impact future goals and tasks. It describes three levels of situational awareness - perception, comprehension, and projection. Maintaining good situational awareness is important but can be challenging due to issues like information overload, unfamiliar systems, and the paradoxical effects of automation. The document provides recommendations for improving situational awareness through research, design, and evaluation techniques.

1. “…it’s the le…it’s the right one…”

2. What is Situational Awareness?

3. Situational Awareness
Being aware of what is happening around
you and understanding what that
information means to you now and in the
future
Endsley, Bolte and Jones, 2003

4. • Researched for around 25 years
• Used widely in Aviation, Military, Power Generation,
Emergency Management, Medicine
• Also applies to everyday events
• ‘A state variable of the human involved in his or her
environment’

5. Perception Comprehension Projection
Level 1 SA Level 2 SA Level 3 SA
Sensemaking Predicting
75% 19% 6%
Time
Helps to determine how soon each
element will have an impact on their
goals and tasks
Sensing
Endsley, Bolte and Jones, 2003

6. • Attentional tunnelling
• Limitations in working memory
• Workload, anxiety, fatigue, stress
• Data overload
• Misplaced information priority
• Complexity creep
• Incorrect mental models
• Out-of-the-loop
Endsley, Bolte and Jones, 2003

7. Shared Situational Awareness
The degree to which team members have
the same situational awareness on shared
situational awareness requirements
Endsley and Jones, 2001

8. • SA is distributed according to hierarchy, space and
time
• Strategic, tactical, operational levels
• Individuals’ SA needs to overlap appropriately
• We constantly make assumptions regarding other
people’s awareness

9. Why is Situational Awareness important?

10. Information Overload:
more information, coming from more
sources

11. • More channels of communication
• More distractions
• 60+ notifications a day on our smart phones
• Constant multitasking degrades our concentration
2. (Mieczakowski, Goldhaber and Clarkson,
2011)
1. (Pielot, Church, Oliveira, Telefonica Research, 2014)
1
2

12. Unfamiliar Service Models:
harder to comprehend and predict events

13. “…the world’s largest taxi company owns no vehicles,
the most popular media owner creates no content, the
largest accommodation provider owns no real
estate…”
(Goodwin, 2015)

14. The Ironies of Automation:
Solves some problems.....creates new
problems

15. • Takes humans out of the loop
• Makes us passive observers - not ‘doers’
• Prevents us developing mental models
• Degrades our ability to predict and recover from
problems

16. How can we improve Situational
Awareness?

17. Research

18. • Know your ‘machine’ and its operating environment
• Focus on failures - ‘bad is stronger than good’
• Goal-based task analysis
1. (Baumeister et al, 2001)
1

19. Design

20. • Attentional tunnelling - provide the big picture
• Limitations in working memory - gather information
• Workload, anxiety, fatigue, stress - don’t make it worse!
• Data overload - innovate in data presentation and alerts
• Misplaced information priority - match information to goals
• Complexity creep - simplify
• Incorrect mental models - support the novice
• Out-of-the-loop - provide support rather than make decisions

21. Evaluation

22. • Situational Awareness Rating Technique
• Situational Awareness Global Assessment Technique
• Quantitative Analysis of Situational Awareness
1. (DTIC, 2004)
1

23. Thank You

24. References
• Endsley, M.R., Bolte, B., Jones, D. G. (2003) Designing for Situation Awareness. London: Taylor and Francis.
• Endsley, M.R and Jones, D.G. (2001) A model of inter- and intrateam situation awareness. In M. McNeese, E. Sales & M. Endsley (Eds),
New Trends in Cooperative Activities: Understanding systems dynamics in complex environments (pp. 46-67). Santa Monica, CA: Human
Factors and Ergonomics Society.
• Mieczakowski, A., Goldhaber, T. and Clarkson, J. (2011) Culture, Communication and Change: Reflections on the user and impact of
modern media and technology in our lives. University of Cambridge.
• Pielot, M., Church, K. and de Oliviera, R. (2014) An In-Situ Study of Mobile Phone Notifications. Mobile HCI ’14.
• Goodwin, T. (2015) The Battle for the Customer Interface, in TechCrunch.com.
• Baumeister, R. F., Bratslavsky, E., Finkenauer, C., Vohs, K.D. (2001). Bad is Stronger than Good, in Review of General Psychology. Vol. 5,
No. 4 pp. 323-370.
• McGuinness, B. (2004) Quantitative Analysis of Situational Awareness (QUASA): Applying Signal Detection Theory to True/False Probes and
Self-Ratings. 2004 Command and Control Research and Technology Symposium.