Frank Cohee, Joe Davis

The challenges with cyber security, and cyber warfare in particular are complicated by the attributes of a cyber “battlespace”. The data sets that represent the values of speed, size and complexity of the cyber landscape are far beyond the capability of human beings to comprehend in a working environment. As the velocity, variety and volume of cyber data increases, the ability of humans to effectively process situational awareness, impacts, tactics and actions will effectively decrease. Many of the current tools for cyber security present ridiculous cognitive load issues for the users and inhibit thinking (even if the additional load is subconscious) and decision-making. This presentation posits that a specialized variant of user-centered design that focuses on augmenting human performance in data-intensive domains, will be critical for cyber security professionals. The process and necessity of user-centered design to enable system-supported decision making (also called decision-advantage) will be discussed as well as examples of industries successfully solving the problem from multi-player gaming, design thinking and data sciences fields.