The following is text of a news release from The Nautical Institute:
(LONDON) — S-mode is the initiative being discussed at the International Maritime Organization (IMO) to bring greater standardization to shipboard electronic navigation systems.
Following strong calls by users to have all manufacturers adopt similar operating environments, the industry has now proposed several ways of doing this. The first is a standard approach to hotkeys; the second is the establishment of "essential information blocks," and the third is to define a list of functions that must be accessible by single or simple operator action. Mariners will benefit from easier familiarization for these critical systems and the industry will benefit from greater safety.
The Nautical Institute wants mariners to have their say. If you are a mariner, please take some time to work through these three short surveys:
Survey 1 – (Icons) This will randomly generate five of a possible 60 new icons for key tasks to gauge mariners' reaction to the level of intuitive design. Leave your feedback and if possible repeat again with five more icons.
Survey 2 – (Card-sorting) https://www.usabilitest.comuxaQH2s. This short survey asks mariners to identify what sort of information they would like to be grouped together and why.
Survey 3 – (Quick-key accessible functions) https://www.usabilitest.com/uxTjAzX. For some functions, you might want them to activate on the click of a single button (single action), but for others you might be willing to have a few clicks to activate (simple).
Note that surveys 2 and 3 might be better to do in groups such as a bridge team, within a shipping company, in a classroom or as a branch workshop.
It is likely that the results of this exercise will lead to a final version of an IMO S-mode guideline that could be approved in 2019.
For more information, click here.
