Development and Use of the Documentation Design Aid

In aviation maintenance and inspection; work documents are critical to safety, as they act as both production control devices and job aids for mechanics and inspectors. Based on an analysis of the current state of documentation in aviation maintenance, there was a clear need to help document designers/writers utilize good human factors practice. Design guidelines were developed and tested (Pate1 et al, 1994) and then made accessible through a Visual Basic window, called the Documentation Design Aid or DDA, available on-screen while writing a procedure. This DDA was tested for usability by writers and for comprehension of the documents produced. A number of different evaluations showed that the DDA reduced comprehension errors significantly. The DDA is now available via’s WWW site for users to download anduse. 1. Documentation Needs in Aviation Maintenance Our civil aviation system is based upon documentation. No job is complete until the paperwork is done. Civil aviation is a highly regulated and highly proceduralized industry, with these two aspects coming together in documentation. Regulators, airlines and manufacturers try to commit their knowledge and experience to documented procedures that, if followed, should ensure safety. While the human factors community may see such a rule-based world as brittle and rather shortsighted (e.g. Rasmussen, 1983) documented, standardized procedures do provide a consistent base from which to start performing tasks. They also provide a means to control workflow and to certify that work was completed. This paper is concerned with improving procedure documentation rather than arguing for or against its efficacy. If we are going to have such procedural documents for the foreseeable future, these job performance aids should at least be designed to conform to human factors good practices. Many studies of errors in aviation maintenance cite information on documentation as a major contributing factor (e.g. Kanki and Walter, 1995). When human factors became an issue in aviation maintenance,and inspection following the Aloha incident in 1988, documentation design again surfaced as a major factor. For example, Dmry, Prabhu and Gramopadhye (1990) performed task analyses of many maintenance and inspection jobs to search for human/system mismatches. They found a severe .mismatch between the documentation current at that time and human factors research findings in information design, e.g. Wright and Barnard (1975). Procedure documents, generally called “workcards” were in poorly-formatted text paragraphs, often in upper case letters, and poorly reproduced on dotmatrix printers. This led to an on-going research program to demonstrate that the human factors principles of good document design did apply to aviation maintenance (not easily accepted in this user community) and to devise ever-easier ways to implement good practices. Now that some success has been achieved, it is appropriate to review our work so far to see how this came about. 2. Documentation Design Issues in Aviation Maintenance At its most basic level, document design to support tasks can be split into two issues: Product and Process. The Product is the final design of the,document, and covers factor such as fidelity, usability, layout, format