Modern marine navigation places significant physical and mental demands on officers stationed on ship bridges, primarily due to the continuous observation and evaluation of real-time navigational information displayed on scattered electronic equipment. To alleviate the high cognitive load experienced by marine officers and allow them to focus on essential tasks during complex situations, the integration of head-up displays (HUDs) in marine applications has emerged as a promising solution. HUDs offer the potential to provide crucial information, enhancing the accessibility and organization of previously disordered data. However, there is limited information on the impact of HUDs on marine officers, which has been explored in the presented work. In this work, a novel immersive navigation experiment with three conditions: traditional display (NonAR), augmented reality (AR) based information presentation, and a variant of AR with essential information only (AR-Indicator) has been conducted. The objective is to explore the effects of these three conditions on navigation performance and mental workload. Our findings indicate that the AR-based information presentation, specifically the variant that includes only essential information, is preferred by participants and showed performance improvements measured by time to complete tasks, gaze duration, and pupil dilation compared to the traditional display and full AR condition. These results have an impact on the design and development of HUDs in marine-related tasks. This pilot research sheds light on the potential benefits of HUDs in improving maritime navigation and paves the way for further advancements in this field.

User interfaces often utilise imagery of pristine natural environments, even if the system’s purpose and context are unrelated to nature. In this paper, we build on evolutionary psychology to develop a theoretical model for the influence of nature imagery on user perceptions of trust, visual aesthetics, and purchase intentions in a corporate sales setting. We evaluate our model by means of an online experiment (n = 408) using a website with different configurations of nature imagery. The results provide support for our theoretical model and hence confirm a positive influence of nature presence, that is, the extent to which the website allows a user to experience the natural environment as being present, on trust, visual aesthetics, and purchase intentions. Thereby, user perceptions of nature presence are specifically linked to nature imagery depicting water as well as vegetation. This study furthers our understanding of how the environmental context of on-site imagery can have subtle information processing benefits for users. For practitioners this study offers insight to the types of imagery that could be utilised more effectively in corporate interface designs.

Assessing the cognitive impact of user interfaces is a shared focus of human-computer interaction researchers and cognitive scientists. Methods of cognitive assessment based on data derived from the system itself, rather than external apparatus, have the potential to be applied in a range of scenarios. The current study applied methods of analyzing kinematics to mouse movements in a computer-based task, alongside the detection response task, a standard workload measure. Sixty-five participants completed a task in which stationary stimuli were tar;geted using a mouse, with a within-subjects factor of task workload based on the number of targets to be hovered over with the mouse (one/two), and a between-subjects factor based on whether both targets (exhaustive) or just one target (minimum-time) needed to be hovered over to complete a trial when two targets were presented. Mouse movement onset times were slower and mouse movement trajectories exhibited more submovements when two targets were presented, than when one target was presented. Responses to the detection response task were also slower in this condition, indicating higher cognitive workload. However, these differences were only found for participants in the exhaustive condition, suggesting those in the minimum-time condition were not affected by the presence of the second target. Mouse movement trajectory results agreed with other measures of workload and task performance. Our findings suggest this analysis can be applied to workload assessments in real-world scenarios.

The usability of the human-machine interface is dependent on the quality of its design and testing. Defining clear criteria that the interface must meet can assist the implementation and evaluation process. These criteria may be based on performance, the quality of users’ experience, error prevention, or the broad utility of the interface. In this article, we motivate the use for workload capacity as an empirical measure of usability. We first describe generic and specific uses for workload measures in terms of adaptive interfaces. We then carry out a systematic review of how workload capacity has been empirically measured, based on 172 relevant literature sources from psychology, neuroscience, engineering, and computer science. We then analyse and report on how workload capacity and related constructs, such as perceptual load, attention, and working memory have been defined and measured in these sources. We discuss similarities and differences between constructs and identify opportunities for integrating real-time workload capacity measures into dynamic interfaces.