Ricerc@Sapienza

Digital technology is now crucial for carrying out many activities and the drive for innovation in digitization has involved not only private organizations but also public administrations. However, despite a growing awareness of the importance of digitization of public services, usability issues have been addressed only recently. Terms like “Usability”, “User Experience”, and “Human-Centred Design” are surely becoming part of the vocabulary, but often they are used as empty keywords by policymakers, while there is a lack of specific research in this domain.

Increasing the level of automation in air traffic management is seen as a measure to increase the performance of the service to satisfy the predicted future demand. This is expected to result in new roles for the human operator: he will mainly monitor highly automated systems and seldom intervene. Therefore, air traffic controllers (ATCos) would often work in a supervisory or control mode rather than in a direct operating mode.