Influence of nuclear power plant interface complexity on user decision-making: an ERP study

ABSTRACUser decision-making concerning critical operations is very important to nuclear power plant (NPP) safety. The NPP interface is the main information source that guides decision-making; thus, a good interface design is essential. Among the interface design factors such as interface complexity, layout and colour, interface complexity (the amount of information in the interface) has the greatest impact on NPP operator decision-making. This paper used the event-related potential (ERP) to evaluate the impact of interface complexity on user decision-making and found interface complexity has a specific range suitable for decision-making. Based on this important finding, a fast and economical method of evaluating NPP interfaces in all design phases was proposed. This method compensates for the shortcomings of traditional methods, such as heuristic evaluation and experimental evaluation, which are inconvenient for evaluating interfaces in initial design phase; it can also be applied to interfaces with similar features in other industrial fields. Practitioner summary: Evaluation of the impact of NPP interface complexity on user decision-making through an ERP experiment revealed a specific range of interface complexity that facilitates user decision-making. Based on this finding, a new, fast and inexpensive interface evaluation method was proposed. Abbreviations: NPP: nuclear power plant, it is a thermal power station in which the heat source is a nuclear reactor; ERP: event-related potential, it is the measured brain response that is the direct result of a specific cognitive, or motor event.