Design and evaluation of an educational tool for understanding functionality in flight simulators : Visualising ARINC 610C

Sammanfattning: The use of simulation in aircraft development and pilot training is essential as it saves time and money. The ARINC 610C standard describes simulator functionality, and is developed to streamline the use of flight simulators. However, the text based standard lacks overview and function descriptions are hard to understand for the simulator developers, who are the main users. In this report, an educational software tool is conceptualised to increase usability of ARINC 610C. The usability goals and requirements were established through multiple interviews and two observation studies. Consequently, six concepts were produced, and evaluated in a workshop with domain experts. Properties from the evaluated concepts were combined in order to form one concluding concept. A prototype was finally developed and evaluated in usability tests with the potential user group. The results from the heuristic evaluation, the usability tests, and a mean system usability score of 79.5 suggests that the prototyped system, developed for visualising ARINC 610C, is a viable solution.