Human-Centered Design Frameworks for High-Stakes Opera- tional Dashboards in Crisis and Disruptive Environments

Abstract

Operational dashboards deployed in high-stakes crisis environments—encompassing emergency management centres, disaster response operations, and disruptive incident command posts are uniquely characterised by extreme cognitive demands, compressed decision timelines, and dynamic, volatile information landscapes. Despite the critical role these interfaces play in supporting life-safety decisions, the majority of currently deployed systems were designed without robust human-centered design (HCD) methodologies, resulting in suboptimal usability, elevated cognitive load, and increased decision error rates. This paper presents a comprehensive,
empirically grounded HCD framework specifically tailored for the design and evaluation of crisis operational dashboards, developed through a multi-phase mixed-methods research programme involving 87 crisis management professionals across six operational centres in four countries. The proposed framework integrates established HCD principles with crisis-specific cognitive and organisational requirements, synthesising insights from distributed cognition theory, naturalistic decision-making, and situation awareness research. Through iterative participatory design and rigorous usability evaluation employing the System Usability Scale (SUS), NASA
Task Load Index (NASA-TLX), and scenario-based performance benchmarking, the framework yields a statistically significant improvement in SUS scores from a baseline mean of 52.3 to 84.1  (p < 0.001) and reduces critical decision error rates by 87.7%. Cognitive load, as measured by NASA-TLX, was reduced by a mean of 44.3% compared to conventional dashboard interfaces. The framework delineates four actionable design tiers—contextual intelligence, adaptive information architecture, progressive disclosure, and multi-modal alert hierarchy each validated through real-world crisis simulation exercises. Findings offer transferable design guidance for practitioners and researchers developing next-generation command-and-control  interfaces across emergency management, defence, healthcare, and critical infrastructure domains.