User-Centered Design and Evaluation of a Real-Time Battlefield Visualization Virtual Environment

The ever-increasing power of computers and hardware rendering systems has, to date, concentrated on creating visually rich and perceptually realistic virtual environment (VE) applications. Comparatively very little effort is expended on the user interaction components of VEs. As a result, VE user interfaces are often poorly designed and are rarely evaluated with users. Although usability engineering is a newly emerging facet of VE development, user-centered design and usability evaluation in VEs as a practice still lags far behind what is needed. This paper presents a structured approach to the iterative, user-centered design and evaluation for user interaction components of VEs. This approach consists of the iterative use of expert heuristic evaluation, followed by formative usability evaluation, followed by summative evaluation. The paper describes our use of this approach with a real-world VE application for battlefield visualization, describes our series of design iterations, and presents evidence that this approach provides a cost-effective strategy for assessing and iteratively improving user interaction design in VEs.