After almost 20 years, deficiencies still exist in ISD and the products prepared for training. Analysts attribute many ISD shortcomings to compromises made in its implementation and limitations in the available tools. To improve the quality of ISD products, the Naval Training System Center is developing a family of software tools to support the ISD front end analysis process. The first of these is VISTA, the Visual Interactive System for Task Analysis.

This paper describes VISTA's design philosophy which incorporated the application of basic human factors data in concert with refinement through iterative test and evaluation. The design process is discussed to include results from system usability tests. The paper also describes VISTA's present state and plans for future development and applications.