Steering a ship – investigating affective state and workload in ship simulations

Abstract

We present an experiment investigating concepts of affective state and workload in a large ship manoeuvring context. It is run on a consumer ship simulator software where student participants (N=31) perform two ecologically valid scenarios: sailing on open sea and in a harbour. Results from surveys show highly significant changes in terms of both affect and workload between the scenarios. Thus, one should consider varying affects and workloads from users in varying contexts, consequently demanding new design paradigms for product development, such as dynamically adaptive interfaces.