# Collaborative System Usability in Spaceflight Analog Environments through Remote Observations
## 3 Methods  
### Analog Mission--Study Overview  
Our research was conducted in the Human Exploration Research Analog (HERA) at NASA Johnson Space Center (JSC) from September 2021 to March 2023. HERA, a 650-square-foot isolation analog, simulates future long-duration exploration missions. HERA is split between two floors and a loft, designed to replicate conditions of isolation, confinement, and remote scenarios in exploration missions. NASA's Human Research Program sets specific research goals and selects research projects to be completed for each HERA Campaign. In each of HERA Campaign 6's (C6) four missions, four astronaut-like crew members lived in the habitat for 45 days and \"embarked\" on a mission to the Martian moon Phobos without physically leaving Earth. Throughout these missions, the crew exclusively engaged in virtual interactions with their family, friends, and Mission Control. While conducting tasks in isolation, these analog crews were closely monitored by research teams to gain insights into behavior, health, and human-systems integration. Despitethis, collecting usability and user evaluations in these missions remained challenging as researchers were not physically present and had to collect data remotely. In HERA C6, crew autonomy was operationalized as the crews' ability to independently manage their own operational timelines. The missions underwent distinct phases:  
* No Autonomy (first seven days): During this initial period, all timelines were fixed and could not be edited by the crew. * Limited Autonomy (next eight days): The subsequent eight days were considered \"limited autonomy\", allowing the crews to reschedule many activities. * High Autonomy (last thirty days): The final thirty days were called \"high autonomy\", where crews' self-scheduling was entirely initiated by crew without external constraints. This phasic shift in autonomy over time aligns with expectations for long-duration space exploration missions. In our research experiment, analog astronauts were specifically asked to self-schedule four of their days, as opposed to just following the timeline provided by Mission Control. For detailed procedures and the experimental design used in the C6 scheduling experiment, refer to [PERSON] et al. [19]. During the limited autonomy phase, our team requested that each crew member lead a team preference meeting (TPM) and participate in a self-scheduling session (SS). Crew members were responsible for scheduling their operational timelines using Playbook (v13; see Figure 1). In the TPM, the assigned planner led an open discussion on timeline preferences. The crew was expected to discuss items such as \"lots of free time in the afternoon\" or \"hygiene periods in the morning\". In the SS, the planner independently created the operational timeline, aiming to integrate the team preferences into a feasible schedule. Participants were allocated thirty minutes for their TPM and one hour to complete their SS. Following the SS, crew members completed the NASA-Task Load Index (NASA-TLX; [20]), a commonly used workload questionnaire in usability studies. In HCI, workload is defined as the demands of a task on an operator's mental and physical resources--developers often desire lower levels of workload to avoid users' cognitive overload. Finally, the crew executed the scheduled day, and the planner provided feedback through a brief questionnaire on their experience. At the end of their mission, crews completed the User Experience Questionnaire (UEQ; [21]) to evaluate Playbook. The UEQ is a 26-item scale that breaks down UX into six distinct factors: attractiveness, perspicuity, efficiency, dependability, stimulation, and novelty. Scores for each of these subscales were computed using a provided calculator (www.ueq-online.org [accessed on 8 February 2024]). The goal with the UEQ was to quantify the usability of our tool in the analog and roughly compare it with prior UEQ scores from lab-based testing [18,22].