A theory of situation assessment for decision support

There is a continuing need for improved capabilities for individual and organizational decision making. Decision support systems (DSSs) offer a potential resolution of this need. Unfortunately, DSSs have met with varying levels of success. The major DSS limitations are difficulty of use, lack of user-friendliness, and limited applications capability.; The decision process consists of two parts: (1) situation assessment, the detection and definition of an issue, and (2) situation resolution, the identification, selection, and implementation of a course of action to correct the issue. A major limitation in the decision process as usually implemented is the minimal effort given to the situation assessment process.; A suggested resolution to the DSS and decision process limitations described above is a theory of situation assessment that concerns: (1) an ecological interface design concept for adapting to the user's information and guidance needs; (2) a prescriptive model of situation assessment that supports issue resolution as well; and (3) empirical and experimental evidence of the value of the prescriptive situation assessment process and the ecological interface. The ecological interface and the situation assessment prescriptive model address the user's task contingency needs.; The prescriptive model, as defined here, is a blend of normative and descriptive models of the decision process and includes the capability to provide proper responses to stress and domain support models that describe the purpose (Why?), function (How?), and structure (What?) of the domain means and ends. The major hypotheses inferred by the theory concern the potential covariation of the user screen selection with the user's experiential level.; For evaluation purposes, we developed a prototype DSS and designed an experiment that consisted of a limited version of the theory using decision makers (fire fighters) from a stress-related real-world environment as subjects for the experiment and collected data on the actions of the subjects who used the prototype DSS.; A conclusion of the research is that an ecological interface can provide effective user-friendly support for decision making provided it is designed properly.