Cognitive Work Analysis

Rasmussen and Vicente’s cognitive work analysis (CWA) is well known as an approach to developing a rich set of design requirements. CWA has become quite well recognized as an approach to understand complex domains and generate requirements for effective new designs. These requirements have resulted in information system interfaces that have improved performance in process control, health, finance, and military domains. The pattern of performance improvements seen with displays developed from CWA is quite particular. For example, improved performance is often seen in fault detection and diagnosis, but not particularly in the performance of regular tasks. Human performance in unanticipated situations is improved, but not performance in normal situations. One way to look at the effects of CWA-based interventions is to consider that CWA creates performance more typical of experts. CWA was a method founded on attempts to understand human expertise and transfer the knowledge of human experts into a design so that the less expert could benefit. From this grounding, CWA is an important method for understanding and transferring expertise. This chapter will move through the steps of CWA and their various contributions to the understanding and development of expertise. Finally, how CWA can be used to develop and transfer expertise through design will be discussed.