The effects of flightdeck display interface aesthetics on pilot performance and workload

Cockpit designs informed by human factors psychology are associated with pilot performance improvements in response time, error rate, and workload. The role of aesthetics in flightdeck performance, however, is discounted as an important area of inquiry in the human factors literature, and receives little treatment in the industrial design literature.; Recent design theories suggest that user experiences are driven not only by designed usability, but also by visceral emotive and self-reflective reactions to products. Accordingly, an extant hypothesis proposes that attractive things may actually work better. A literature search demonstrated this hypothesis is untested with respect to objective performance and subjective workload on the flightdeck. This dissertation's purpose is to discuss the implications of flightdeck aesthetics, and to explore and clarify the effects of flightdeck aesthetics on pilot performance and workload.; Twenty-four pilots participated in a 2 x 2 within-subjects factorial experiment that varied graphical display interface skin aesthetics via variables of color (2 levels) and format (2 levels). A control condition without a skin was also used. Pilots rated and ranked interface aesthetics, and completed simulated tasks of hand-flying an instrument approach to minimums and managing alert messages using interfaces that represented all independent variable level combinations. Quantitative measures included flight technical error, alert message response time and error rate, and subjective workload. Pilots further qualitatively justified their most preferred and least preferred interfaces.; Results indicated that workload was significantly higher with a pilot's least preferred interface, and significantly lower with a pilot's most preferred interface, even with only a fascia---and not functional---change. However, changing the fascia did not significantly affect objective performance.; The implications are (1) given equivalent levels of designed functionality and usability, aesthetics can drive perceived workload, and (2) the looks better-works better hypothesis is not sufficient to define the relationship between industrial design synthesis and human factors evaluation activities. Implications for design are provided, as is an alternative hypothesis in which integrating designed aesthetics and usability yields a functional thing measurably better---in performance and preference---than the sum of measured benefits from designed aesthetics and usability activities executed in isolation.