Emergent features in visual display design for two types of failure detection tasks

Visual display design for dynamic systems may be helped by exploiting emergent features that allow subjects to easily distinguish different states of the system. Three different types of displays were compared--two object displays and one separated display--each in a version that had a salient emergent feature that distinguished normal and failed states and in a version that did not have such an emergent feature. Subjects monitored for global and local failures simultaneously, which presented demands similar to integrated and separated tasks, respectively. Displays with salient emergent features supported superior global failure detection and may also have helped local failure detection. An object display with a salient emergent feature supported both types of failures better than or at least as well as the other displays. This advantage was attributed to the fact that the display had a salient emergent feature rather than to the fact that it was an object display. This research shows that emergent features can be effectively exploited to support tasks involving both integration of information and attention to individual data sources.