Re: [SAGE] Color identifiers and products like Nagios ...

[Dan Foster <sage@evilphb.org>]

Hot Diggety! EMail List Subscriptions was rumored to have written:
> 
> IMHO the display should include at least two dimensions:
>  a) how far out is the reading

That's a good point, and one that user interface engineers for avionics
(aircraft comm/navigation/computer systems) has handled in jets by often
incorporating a dial-type electronic gauge, along with careful use of
colour.

You can see this with the Boeing 777-300 engine display (EICAS):

http://www.airliners.net/open.file?id=739730&size=L

(No user/pass required; file is ~330KB.)

They use colours in a consistent and standardized way; blue to indicate
labels, white for current quantities, green for current mode, magenta
for user-selected settings, amber for informational or early warning
(non-critical), red for critical warnings, and so forth.

But, note the use of dials for the two engines in the EICAS display
along the left side of the photographs.

Using dials with an uncluttered 'tick mark display' and complemented by
a box showing quantity... it's easy to visually see how far you are; in
a good, degrading, or bad situation, and to what extent.

(The engines are currently powered off, but when they're on, even in an
idle detent power setting at 40% N1, there will be a thick grey band at
the bottom of the dial, visually showing its current power setting.)

Also further reinforced by the fact that display system logic changes
the colour of the box around the quantity when it goes out of a normal
range, as an attention-grabbing device, along with aural alarms for
certain situations.

Overall design philosophy for the Boeing alerting system is to present
advance indications of a worrisome trend. If it gets serious enough,
warn several times. Then stop and stay out of flight crew's hair to
avoid distraction from working the problem. (Planes has crashed before
due to mental task overload or severe distraction in a bad situation.)

The design also has prioritization (point 'b' mentioned in the email)
built into it, as well. Won't go into details here, but it's there.

All are UI and design concepts that could certainly be incorporated to
monitoring systems that we use, to some degree.

Disclaimer: I only used Boeing as an example here since I know these
systems the best... but could have had as easily been a Dassault,
Hawker-Siddeley, Tupolev, Airbus, or some other aircraft. :)

>From the email, cited was:

> 2. Not everyone displays the color the same - it needs to be configurable.

That's indeed true... not just colour blindness but also varying levels
or issues with the ol' Mark I optical system (eyeballs). As well as
differing computer hardware.

I find colours are much more washed out on a typical LCD display than on
the CRT, and took me a while to get used to it when I switched to the
19" LCD.

However, I should point out that one of the tenets of UI design is also
predictability. How do you accomplish that if the same thing can be
represented in a number of different ways? Red/blue/polka dot for Al,
Yellow/purple/orange for Mary, and so forth...

(Imagine having to write end user documentation for *that*!)

This might work out ok in a non-shared setup, though I would still be
somewhat hesitant to offer this particular feature on a per-user basis
in that kind of application. Might make some sense on a global basis, as
that puts everybody 'on the same page' and is much easier to document.

Miss Davis, if you're looking to improve the usability and UI of your
monitoring systems, a good place to start might be to look at how actual
monitoring systems for mission critical systems do it, because they tend
to have some of the best designs in the world given their nature.

Hospital machines, nuclear power control room, aircraft displays, chip
fab plant monitoring systems, and so forth. There's often interesting
write-ups on them in various periodicals or websites.

That's the best I can offer as I don't have any formal background in UI
or usability design, though I have read up on it over the years.

-Dan