NASA HCI Reports:

Literature Review (500 kb)

The purpose of this literature review was to begin to understand the scope of the project our team will be undertaking over the coming semester and this summer. This task was narrowed to have three specific goals: first, to gain a baseline understanding of the current PRACA system and standing recommendations for change; second, to explore the extent to which and for what handheld systems are used in a variety of industries; and third, to analyze the process of problem reporting before beginning contextual inquiries (CIs). Guided by these areas of research, our team summarized and highlighted a number of articles. Notable among them are the MoRé project, analyses of the PRACA system done internally by NASA, the Wiisard system, and the CM3 problem management system.

The information about PRACA will be immediately useful for guiding CIs, and will also eventually help to shape the design of the final device. An understanding of the current system and where it needs improvement is an invaluable asset as we are performing interviews. This is especially true given our limited access to actual NASA facilities at present. The Wiisard and MoRé papers were also illuminating in terms of guiding further research in the mobile device domain, but also had the added benefit of giving us new perspectives on what a "handheld device" is and how it could be used. Finally, other papers on problem management gave us a general idea of problem reporting as it is applied outside of NASA.

Midterm Review