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Meza, David

Publications and source records attributed to Meza, David.

Understanding the International Space Station Crew Perspective following Long-Duration Missions through Data Analytics & Visualization of Crew Feedback

The International Space Station (ISS) first became a home and research laboratory for NASA and International Partner crewmembers over 16 years ago. Each ISS mission lasts approximately 6 months and consists of three to six crewmembers. After returning to Earth, most crewmembers participate in an extensive series of 30+ debriefs intended to further understand life onboard ISS and allow crews to reflect on their experiences. Examples of debrief data collected include ISS crew feedback about sleep, dining, payload science, scheduling and time planning, health & safety, and maintenance. The Flight Crew Integration (FCI) Operational Habitability (OpsHab) team, based at Johnson Space Center (JSC), is a small group of Human Factors engineers and one stenographer that has worked collaboratively with the NASA Astronaut office and ISS Program to collect, maintain, disseminate and analyze this data. The database provides an exceptional and unique resource for understanding the "crew perspective" on long duration space missions. Data is formatted and categorized to allow for ease of search, reporting, and ultimately trending, in order to understand lessons learned, recurring issues and efficiencies gained over time. Recently, the FCI OpsHab team began collaborating with the NASA JSC Knowledge Management team to provide analytical analysis and visualization of these over 75,000 crew comments in order to better ascertain the crew's perspective on long duration spaceflight and gain insight on changes over time. In this initial phase of study, a text mining framework was used to cluster similar comments and develop measures of similarity useful for identifying relevant topics affecting crew health or performance, locating similar comments when a particular issue or item of operational interest is identified, and providing search capabilities to identify information pertinent to future spaceflight systems and processes for things like procedure development and training. In addition, the comments were scored for sentiment using a polarity scoring algorithm to identify both positive and negative comments for particular groups and clusters, allowing the team to make analytically informed decisions regarding future hardware and operating procedures. The use of polarity scoring with time series analysis was used to provide insight into how crew health and habitability is changing throughout various spaceflight increments or the station lifecycle as a whole. Finally, a visualization framework was developed to address the needs of the end users to search for and analyze comments by user, category or mission. This paper will discuss how the use of an analytical framework in conjunction with the current human interface, improved the understanding of crew perspective and shortened the time for analysis allowing for more informed decisions and rapid development of improvements. These methods are significantly optimizing the way that this valuable data can be assessed and applied to current and future spaceflight design and development. This collaboration allows the FCI OpsHab team to effectively analyze and share data in a more automated and timely fashion. Trends are no longer derived manually and can be illustrated effectively and accurately with these evolving techniques to an ever growing group of human spaceflight end users.

Bryant, Cody

Sentiment of Search: KM and IT for User Expectations

User perceived value is the number one indicator of a successful implementation of KM and IT collaborations. The system known as "Search" requires more strategy and workflow that a mere data dump or ungoverned infrastructure can provide. Monitoring of user sentiment can be a driver for providing objective measures of success and justifying changes to the user interface. The dynamic nature of information technology makes traditional usability metrics difficult to identify, yet easy to argue against. There is little disagreement, however, on the criticality of adapting to user needs and expectations. The Systems Usability Scale (SUS), developed by John Brook in 1986 has become an industry standard for usability engineering. The first phase of a modified SUS, polls the sentiment of representative users of the JSC Search system. This information can be used to correlate user determined value with types of information sought and how the system is (or is not) meeting expectations. Sentiment analysis by way of the SUS assists an organization in identification and prioritization of the KM and IT variables impacting user perceived value. A secondary, user group focused analysis is the topic of additional work that demonstrates the impact of specific changes dictated by user sentiment.

Berndt, Sarah Ann

Usability/Sentiment for the Enterprise and ENTERPRISE

The purpose of the Sentiment of Search Study for NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) is to gain insight into the intranet search environment. With an initial usability survey, the authors were able to determine a usability score based on the Systems Usability Scale (SUS). Created in 1986, the freely available, well cited, SUS is commonly used to determine user perceptions of a system (in this case the intranet search environment). As with any improvement initiative, one must first examine and document the current reality of the situation. In this scenario, a method was needed to determine the usability of a search interface in addition to the user's perception on how well the search system was providing results. The use of the SUS provided a mechanism to quickly ascertain information in both areas, by adding one additional open-ended question at the end. The first ten questions allowed us to examine the usability of the system, while the last questions informed us on how the users rated the performance of the search results. The final analysis provides us with a better understanding of the current situation and areas to focus on for improvement. The power of search applications to enhance knowledge transfer is indisputable. The performance impact for any user unable to find needed information undermines project lifecycle, resource and scheduling requirements. Ever-increasing complexity of content and the user interface make usability considerations for the intranet, especially for search, a necessity instead of a 'nice-to-have'. Despite these arguments, intranet usability is largely disregarded due to lack of attention beyond the functionality of the infrastructure (White, 2013). The data collected from users of the JSC search system revealed their overall sentiment by means of the widely-known System Usability Scale. Results of the scores suggest 75%, +/-0.04, of the population rank the search system below average. In terms of a grading scaled, this equated to D or lower. It is obvious JSC users are not satisfied with the current situation, however they are eager to provide information and assistance in improving the search system. A majority of the respondents provided feedback on the issues most troubling them. This information will be used to enrich the next phase, root cause analysis and solution creation.

Meza, David

JSC Search System Usability Case Study

The advanced nature of "search" has facilitated the movement from keyword match to the delivery of every conceivable information topic from career, commerce, entertainment, learning... the list is infinite. At NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC ) the Search interface is an important means of knowledge transfer. By indexing multiple sources between directorates and organizations, the system's potential is culture changing in that through search, knowledge of the unique accomplishments in engineering and science can be seamlessly passed between generations. This paper reports the findings of an initial survey, the first of a four part study to help determine user sentiment on the intranet, or local (JSC) enterprise search environment as well as the larger NASA enterprise. The survey is a means through which end users provide direction on the development and transfer of knowledge by way of the search experience. The ideal is to identify what is working and what needs to be improved from the users' vantage point by documenting: (1) Where users are satisfied/dissatisfied (2) Perceived value of interface components (3) Gaps which cause any disappointment in search experience. The near term goal is it to inform JSC search in order to improve users' ability to utilize existing services and infrastructure to perform tasks with a shortened life cycle. Continuing steps include an agency based focus with modified questions to accomplish a similar purpose

Meza, David