Development of a Work-centered Infomediary Application Toolkit (WAT)

"The mismatch between worker needs and information systems interface design and performance has long been noted, and has given rise to a large body of research on ways to factor the user more explicitly into the interface and system design process. Activework-centered interfaces that act as infomediaries between underlying systems and their users, offer the most comprehensive solution to this usability problem, but also pose the greatest technological challenge. In Phase I, the research team at CHI Systemsevolved a novel work-centered active interface reference architecture called the Work-centered Infomediary Layer (WIL), and designed a WIL Application Toolkit (WAT) as a set of software tools to support and streamline the process of designing, coding, andtesting WIL interfaces. Phase II will implement the WAT design, using a spiral development engineering approach, and apply WAT to a specific operational Air Force work-domain (a subset of the Airspace Coordination Order planning process). The resultingWAT provides a development process that is inspectable and traceable throughout the application's life cycle, and supports maintenance/update of the resulting interface code as well as initial design. The WAT will generate fully-executable interfacecode that can be used directly, but which is also highly customizable."