In time-sensitive environments, such as DHS emergency operations centers (EOCs), it is imperative for decision makers
to rapidly understand and address key logical relationships that exist between tasks, entities, and events, even as
conditions fluctuate. These relationships often have important temporal characteristics, such as tasks that must be
completed before others can be started (e.g., buses must be transported to an area before an evacuation process can
begin). Unfortunately, traditional temporal display methods, such as mission timelines, typically reveal only rudimentary
event details and fail to support user understanding of and reasoning about critical temporal constraints and
interrelationships across multiple mission components. To address these shortcomings, we developed a visual language
to enhance temporal data displays by explicitly and intuitively conveying these constraints and relationships to decision
makers. In this paper, we detail these design strategies and describe ongoing evaluation efforts to assess their usability
and effectiveness to support decision-making tasks in complex, time-sensitive environments. We present a case study in
which we applied our visual enhancements to a timeline display, improving the perception of logical relationships
among events in a Master Scenario Event List (MSEL). These methods reduce the cognitive workload of decision
makers and improve the efficacy of identification.
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