Work Analysis Methods in Practice: The Context of Collaborative Review of CAD Models

Human work interaction design is an emerging discipline that aims to encourage empirical studies and conceptualizations of the interaction among humans, their variegated social contexts and the technology they use both within and across these contexts. In this paper the authors present a virtual reality system for visualization, navigation and reviewing of 3D CAD models within the oil industry domain. This system combines a large-screen interaction environment with remote mobile devices, thus allowing engineers in the field and teams in a control center to work in collaboration. To navigate through models the system uses the mobile device’s camera and inertial sensors and takes advantage of recent natural interaction techniques on large-screen environments. The authors describe and elaborate around the usage of different work analysis methods in this complex, real world work domain. The analysis is based on (i) input from experts in the oil platform engineering field, (ii) previous and related work and (iii) application of different methods considering the recent advances in technology. The authors conclude that hierarchical task analysis was not effective in obtaining a clear, common vision about the work domain. Storyboarding was the most useful technique as it promoted the discovery of novelty factors that differentiate the solution, while simultaneously supporting the human work at offshore engineering design and review sessions.