The Weight of User Decision Making During Online Interactions - Planning an Experiment

This paper lays out the design of a research study, using eye tracking technology, to measure participant cognitive load when encountering decision constructs during webpage interactions. It elaborates and improves on a pilot study that was used to test the experiment design. Cognitive load is discussed in detail, in both physiological and subjective terms, as well as techniques to capture participants’ thoughts and feelings immediately after the experiment. This mixed method approach will generate a more holistic comprehension of participants’ decision making and their rationale; and hopefully, improve information systems design ethics

Users’ Cognitive and Emotional Costs of Rebuilding Habits: The Case of Mobile Banking

Users’ constant interaction with digital interfaces and applications facilitates the development of habits in a given context. An interface redesign can disrupt a person’s established use pattern. As companies frequently update and redesign their digital applications, it is crucial to uncover the impact of interface re-adaptation on their clients’ attitudes and user experience. A within-subjects laboratory experiment was conducted with current users of an existing mobile banking application. Participants performed a series of tasks during consecutive visits to the current and updated versions of the application. Psychophysiological, perceptual, and behavioral data were collected via measurement of cognitive load, emotional experience, subjective attitude, and objective performance. Results suggest interface changes that disrupt users\u27 cognitive scripts impair re-adaptation; this entails greater cognitive load, perceived effort, and task completion times, as well as worsened perceptions of navigability during the completion of familiar tasks on the new interface. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.\u2

Keystroke Saving in a Language with Highly Transparent Orthography

This paper proposes a pseudo-syllabic soft keyboard for the Croatian language. The orthogonal keyboard layout makes it possible to improve typing efficiency in terms of keystroke saving, and is based on a highly ordered arrangement of pseudo-syllabic keys. The positions of the consonant and vowel graphemes that constitute a pseudo-syllable are used to access it orthogonally and independently each other. This allows the user to input a pseudo-syllable with a lower cognitive load than with non-orthogonal 2-D layouts. Moreover, due to the almost perfect transparency of the language, a pseudo-syllable to be input can be accessed fast and with a reduced cognitive load starting from its phonetic sounds. The results of the present study show that the obtainable keystroke savings are comparable with those scored by word prediction tools with one suggestion, i.e., those requiring only a moderate cognitive load by the user

Watching People Making Decisions: A Gogglebox on Online Consumer Interaction

This paper presents a research study, using eye tracking technology, to measure participant cognitive load when encountering micro-decision. It elaborates and improves on a pilot study that was used to test the experiment design. Prior research that led to a taxonomy of decision constructs faced in online transactional processes is discussed. The main findings relate to participants’ subjective cognitive load and task error rates

Attention, workload, and performance: A dual-task simulated shooting study

During skill execution, performers have been shown to attend to different aspects of movement, the external effects of one’s action, or to other environmental information. A variety of psychological mechanisms have been proposed to account for the differential outcomes when adopting each attentional strategy. However, there is limited information about the extent to which different attentional foci change the workload demands of task performance. To examine this, the current study administered the NASA-Task Load Index following a simulated shooting dual-task. Participants performed the primary shooting task alone (control), and also with a secondary task that directed attention toward an aspect of skill execution (skill-focused) and an unrelated environmental stimulus (extraneous focus). Primary and secondary task performances were significantly greater in the extraneous focus compared to the skill-focused dual-task. Also, workload was significantly lower during the extraneous focus compared to the skill-focused dual-task condition. Further analyses revealed that workload significantly mediated the effects of skill level on performance during the skill-focused and extraneous focus dual-tasks and various subscales of workload (i.e., temporal demand) contributed unique amounts of variance to this relationship. A discussion of the relationship between attention, workload and its subcomponents, skill level, and performance is presented

On the Mental Workload Assessment of Uplift Mapping Representations in Linked Data

Self-reporting procedures have been largely employed in literature to measure the mental workload experienced by users when executing a specific task. This research proposes the adoption of these mental workload assessment techniques to the task of creating uplift mappings in Linked Data. A user study has been performed to compare the mental workload of “manually” creating such mappings, using a formal mapping language and a text editor, to the use of a visual representation, based on the block metaphor, that generate these mappings. Two subjective mental workload instruments, namely the NASA Task Load Index and the Workload Profile, were applied in this study. Preliminary results show the reliability of these instruments in measuring the perceived mental workload for the task of creating uplift mappings. Results also indicate that participants using the visual representation achieved smaller and more consistent scores of mental workload

Thinking Fast or slow? Understanding Answering Behavior Using Dual-Process Theory through Mouse Cursor Movements

Users’ underlying cognitive states govern their behaviors online. For instance, an extreme cognitive burden during live system use would negatively influence important user behaviors such as using the system and purchasing a product. Thus, inferring the user's cognitive state has practical significance for the commercialized systems. We use Dual-Process Theory to explain how the mouse cursor movements can be an effective measure of cognitive load. In an experimental study with five hundred and thirty-four subjects, we induced cognitive burden then monitored mouse cursor movements when the participants answered questions in an online survey. We found that participants' mouse cursor movements slow down when they are engaged in cognitively demanding tasks. With the newly derived measures, we were able to infer the state of heightened cognitive load with an overall accuracy of 70.22%. The results enable researchers to measure users' cognitive load with more granularity and present a new, theoretically sound method to assess the user's cognitive state

Subjective Usability, Mental Workload Assessments and Their Impact on Objective Human Performance

Self-reporting procedures and inspection methods have been largely employed in the fields of interaction and web-design for assessing the usability of interfaces. However, there seems to be a propensity to ignore features related to end-users or the context of application during the usability assessment procedure. This research proposes the adoption of the construct of mental workload as an additional aid to inform interaction and web-design. A user-study has been performed in the context of human-web interaction. The main objective was to explore the relationship between the perception of usability of the interfaces of three popular web-sites and the mental workload imposed on end-users by a set of typical tasks executed over them. Usability scores computed employing the System Usability Scale were compared and related to the mental workload scores obtained employing the NASA Task Load Index and the Workload Profile self-reporting assessment procedures. Findings advise that perception of usability and subjective assessment of mental workload are two independent, not fully overlapping constructs. They measure two different aspects of the human-system interaction. This distinction enabled the demonstration of how these two constructs cab be jointly employed to better explain objective performance of end-users, a dimension of user experience, and informing interaction and web-design

Successful Data Science Projects: Lessons Learned from Kaggle Competition

The workflow from data understanding to deployment of an analytical model of a data science project begins at framing the problem at hand, a task that is typically business-oriented and requires human-to-human interaction. However, the next three steps: data understanding, feature extraction, and model building that come next in the pipeline are the key to successful data science projects. Failing to fully understand the requirements of each of these three steps can negatively affect the performance of the proposed system. Hence, the current study tries to answer the following question “What are the requirements of a successful data science project?” To answer this question, we will use the solution that we built to measure the relevance of local search results of small online e-businesses and submitted to Kaggle data science platform to shed light on why our solution did not achieve a top position among other competitors. Evaluation of the design that we submitted to the competition is going to be carried out in the spirit of the three winning submissions. Our results revealed that well-performed data preprocessing, well-defined features, and model ensembling are critical for building successful data science projects. Such a clarification provides insight into specific aspects of model design to help others including Kagglers avoid possible mistakes while approaching their data science projects

Improved Teaching of Database Schema Modeling by Visualizing Changes in Levels of Abstraction

Conceptual modeling of databases is a complex cognitive activity, particularly for novice database designers. The current research empirically tests a new pedagogy for this activity. It examines an instructional approach that stresses visualizing gradual transitions between levels of abstraction in different hierarchic levels of a relational database schema. The new approach builds on a four-level TSSL model from the field of human-computer interaction. TSSL, an acronym for the Task, Semantics, Syntax, and Lexical levels, is applied here to describe the levels of conceptual database modeling and to explain how improved instructional design can help minimize extraneous cognitive load during the design of database schemas. We tested the effectiveness of the proposed instructional approach via a controlled experiment carried out on IS students. We divided students into two groups, those exposed to a visual emphasis on the syntax of gradual transitions in a schema structure and those not exposed to it. We then measured performance in terms of errors in students’ solutions while also recording their perceptions and attitudes toward the instructional approach and the activity of database modeling. Our results show that the new approach is an effective tool for teaching database modeling