Human factors and use of amusement ride control interfaces.

Abstract Amusement rides are a familiar form of recreation and an important component in the tourism industry, found in both fixed-site amusement parks and travelling carnivals. Standards governing design of the operator's control interfaces are broad and provide little specific direction about ideal design. This paper describes existing interfaces and their use, reports on a heuristic evaluation of carnival interfaces, and describes differences in ride-operation tasks across the domain. Differences in the ride-operation task create different control interface priorities in different contexts. Prevention of slips is the interface priority for multiple-operator rides, where function allocation and automation reduce the control decision-making required. Interfaces in single-operator rides and control towers must support operators to diagnose and respond rapidly and effectively to infrequent exceptional situations, and prevent mistakes by assisting situation awareness and making responses intuitive, along with minimizing the potential for slips. Relevance to industry Amusement ride control interface guidelines permit wide latitude of interface design, and best practices primarily resist slips, not mistakes possible under some modes of function allocation. Guidelines need to incorporate guidance for improved mapping of control inputs to process response to resist potential mistakes in manual control or exception handling.