Investigating cognitive load
I'm conducting a small user research in order to understand the cognitive load of planning a ski tour using skitourenguru.ch, a planning tool specifically designed to assist alpine roamers in safely planning their tours or trips. I decided to investigate specifically the cognitive load, as I viewed this as an important factor for critical desicions making. To investigate it I chose to use a standardized questionnaire designed by NASA, the NASA-TLX, to assess the subjective workload of a human-machine interaction task.
The planning tool
The planning tool of choice, the Komoot of ski-touring, is a project funded by multiple institutions that wanted to promote the safety of mountain sports. The tool sources data from a variety of sources, all publicly available, and combines them in order to give the user a better understanding of the condition in different routes, as well as giving the user options to create and export custom routes. During all the steps of the planning the user is given information to personally evaluate the risks and determine wether he trusts the sources.
The findings
As soon as I'm done with the research I'll update this section with the findings, so stay tuned! I will also publish a short report on my research.
