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Exploring and Evaluating the Usability Factors for Military Application: A Road Map for HCI in Military Applications

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Abstract

Usability is the key quality attribute of any software system. Military forces are designed to deal with unexpected situations in the battlefield; thus, the military applications are used in a specific context like war, minor operations, special operations (counter terrorism, natural disaster), etc. by the specific group of users/soldiers. The existing usability factors are mainly used to evaluate the general-purpose applications like e-commerce, e-governance, etc. but may not be suitable for the design and evaluation of military applications. Moreover, no specific set of usability factors or metrices were suggested in existing literature to design and evaluate military applications. Therefore, the objectives of this research were, firstly, to reveal the all possible usability factors that would be suitable for designing, developing, and evaluating any military application and, secondly, to show the applicability of these factors to evaluate a military application from HCI perspective. As such, an “advanced battlefield communication system” was developed to support the command structure for enabling the higher commanders by establishing an audio-video communication link with the frontline troops. An explorative study was conducted following the focused group discussion (FGD) with 20 participants to reveal the all possible usability factors for developing and evaluating any military application, while an evaluation study was conducted through field study with 30 participants to assess the applicability of the revealed usability factors. As outcomes, (a) an advanced battlefield communication system was developed for military; and (b) a total of 14 usability factors were revealed and validated for designing and evaluating military applications, where most of the factors were new and innovative like chain of command supportive, placement and integration of system accessories, lightness/weight of accessories, and health hazard.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Military Institute of Science and Technology (MIST), Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh

    Md Abdur Razzak & Muhammad Nazrul Islam

Authors
  1. Md Abdur Razzak
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  2. Muhammad Nazrul Islam
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Correspondence to Muhammad Nazrul Islam.

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Appendices

Appendix 1: Screenshots of Advanced Battle Field Communication Systems

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System console for head quarter

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All divisional command page

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Homepage of mobile app

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Appendix 2: Subjective Rating of Usability Factors

Table 6 Summary of the subjective rating to different factors
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Razzak, M., Islam, M.N. Exploring and Evaluating the Usability Factors for Military Application: A Road Map for HCI in Military Applications. Hum Factors Mech Eng Def Saf 4, 4 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41314-019-0032-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s41314-019-0032-6

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