Putting it all together: improving display integration in ecological displays

Computer displays are being designed for increasingly larger industrial systems. As the application domain scales up, maintaining integration across different kinds of views becomes more challenging. This paper presents the results of a study of three different approaches to integration based on the spatial and temporal proximity of related information objects. The domain used for evaluation was a simulation of an industry-scale conventional power plant. All three displays were ecological displays developed using an abstraction hierarchy analysis. Views were integrated in a high-space/low-time, low-space/high-time, and high-space/high-time integration of means-end related objects. During a fault detection and diagnosis task, it was found that a low level of integration, high-space/ low-time, provided the fastest fault detection time. However, the most integrated condition, high-space/high-time, resulted in the fastest and most accurate fault diagnosis performance. Actual or potential applications of this research include computer displays for large-scale systems such as network management or process control, for which problem solving is critical and integration must be maintained.