ASSESSING THE USABILITY OF MONTEREY PHOENIX SOFTWARE

The current and future system engineer’s toolkit increasingly contains complex software applications to aid in the defining and designing of systems. This thesis presents an examination of the software usability reported by a group of DOD military and civilian personnel who were exposed to one such application, the Monterey Phoenix (MP) modeling tool, for the first time. The objective of this analysis is to test the hypothesis that, among new users, those with prior modeling background will report a better MP user experience and better software usability than those without prior modeling background. Naval Postgraduate School students and faculty who responded to an invitation to participate in an ONR-sponsored, usability study completed a carefully constructed protocol designed to identify modeling experience level, provide a brief introductory tutorial to the MP software, present participants with a simple modeling task using MP, and capture feedback from users at the completion of the protocol. Participant feedback produced data for use in the calculation of System Usability Scale scores, Net Promoter Scores, and the NASA Task Load Index, which are established measures of usability. Finally, a Monterey Phoenix subject-matter expert developed and applied a grading rubric in the evaluation of MP models that study participants produced.

Department dc:contributor.department

Systems Engineering (SE)

Grantor dc:publisher

Monterey, CA; Naval Postgraduate School

Year dc:date.issued

2019

Author dc:creator

• Gramp, Timothy

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Giammarco, Kristin M.

Statement dc:rights

• This publication is a work of the U.S. Government as defined in Title 17, United States Code, Section 101. Copyright protection is not available for this work in the United States.

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10945/64172

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:calhoun.nps.edu:10945/64172