A GUI prototype for SKA1 TM services: compliance with user-centered design approach

Adopting the recommendations for the control room obtained by a user-centered design approach for the Square Kilometer Array (SKA), the following characteristics for the SKA Graphical User Interface (GUI) have been identified: scalability, integrated tools, extendability and completeness. The lack of one or more of these characteristics could lead to usability problems like low user’s efficiency, high error rate, high user’s mental load and user’s frustration. In this paper one of the most recent web technologies that enable the user-centered design are analyzed. TangoWebApp, a pluggable web platform integrated with TANGO Control REST API, appears very suitable also taking into account the adoption of TANGO as the SKA control framework. Starting from a SKA Telescope Manager (TM) Services use case, a prototype has been developed composed by a series of TANGO WebApp plugins that allow the operator to correctly and efficiently complete the tasks of the scenario. Some of the plugins, in particular, have been developed to extend the functionalities of the TANGO WebApp itself to make it fully compliant with the User Centered Design. As a result of this work, the TangoWebapp proved itself not only fully compliant with the User Centered Design, but also flexible enough to add functionalities in the form of properly developed plugins. These characteristics of the TangoWebapp, together with its unique feature to be integrated into TANGO, make it a good candidate to be the SKA GUI platform.