Learning with facilitation affordances: The case of citizens’ advice services

How can employees be qualified to provide sound customer advisory services? How can they be empowered to deliver the value of public sector modernization to customers? In this paper, we offer a novel approach to qualify service personnel on-the-job using “facilitation affordances”. In this approach, artifacts, providing appropriately designed facilitation affordances, are introduced into service personnel’s work practices. These facilitation artifacts invite them to start experiential learning, and, hence, to improve their advice giving behavior. To develop our approach, we followed a design research approach, here we developed a set of design requirements and, ultimately, five design principles for facilitation artifacts. We tested our approach in the context of citizens’ advice services in public administrations. We implemented a prototype facilitation artifact and conducted a user study with six real-world advisors and twelve clients. Our preliminary results show that the “learning with facilitation affordances”-approach promises to enhance the service personnel’s skills that matter in modern public administrations. Furthermore, with the proposed qualification approach and the design principles for facilitation artifacts, we seek to deepen the knowledge on the importance of affordances for learning and, concurrently, provide practitioners with useful guidelines to implement the “learning with facilitation affordances”-approach in their organizations

Collaborative behavior, performance and engagement with visual analytics tasks using mobile devices

Interactive visualizations are external tools that can support users’ exploratory activities. Collaboration can bring benefits to the exploration of visual representations or visu‐ alizations. This research investigates the use of co‐located collaborative visualizations in mobile devices, how users working with two different modes of interaction and view (Shared or Non‐Shared) and how being placed at various position arrangements (Corner‐to‐Corner, Face‐to‐Face, and Side‐by‐Side) affect their knowledge acquisition, engagement level, and learning efficiency. A user study is conducted with 60 partici‐ pants divided into 6 groups (2 modes×3 positions) using a tool that we developed to support the exploration of 3D visual structures in a collaborative manner. Our results show that the shared control and view version in the Side‐by‐Side position is the most favorable and can improve task efficiency. In this paper, we present the results and a set of recommendations that are derived from them

Designing novel interactional workspaces to support face-to-face consultations

This paper describes the design and deployment of a novel interactional workspace, intended to provide more effective support for face-to-face consultations between two parties. We focus on the initial consultations between customer and agent that take place during the development of complex products. Findings from an ethnographic study of the existing use of technological systems show the interaction during such consultations to be disjointed and not well supported. As an alternative approach, we developed a novel arrangement of multiple displays intended to promote shoulder-to-shoulder collaboration using a variety of interlinked representations and visualizations. The resulting interactional workspace was used by a travel company as part of a large international trade show attended by the general public. The many consultations that took place between agents and customers were quite different, proving to be more equitable, open, fluid and congenial

On the Use of Large Interactive Displays to Support Collaborative Engagement and Visual Exploratory Tasks

Large interactive displays can provide suitable workspaces for learners to conduct collaborative learning tasks with visual information in co-located settings. In this research, we explored the use of these displays to support collaborative engagement and exploratory tasks with visual representations. Our investigation looked at the effect of four factors (number of virtual workspaces within the display, number of displays, position arrangement of the collaborators, and collaborative modes of interaction) on learners' knowledge acquisition, engagement level, and task performance. To this end, a user study was conducted with 72 participants divided into 6 groups using an interactive tool developed to support the collaborative exploration of 3D visual structures. The results of this study showed that learners with one shared workspace and one single display can achieve better user performance and engagement levels. In addition, the back-to-back position with learners sharing their view and control of the workspaces was the most favorable. It also led to improved learning outcomes and engagement levels during the collaboration process

Understanding and Enhancing Customer-Agent-Computer Interaction in Customer Service Settings

Providing good customer service is crucial to many commercial organizations. There are different means through which the service can be provided, such as Ecommerce, call centres or face-to-face. Although some service is provided through electronic or telephone-based interaction, it is common that the service is provided through human agents. In addition, many customer service interactions also involve a computer, for example, an information system where a travel agent finds suitable flights. This thesis seeks to understand the three channels of customer service interactions between the agent, customer and computer: Customer-Agent-Computer Interaction (CACI). A set of ethnographic studies were conducted at call centres to gain an initial understanding of CACI and to investigate the customer-computer channel. The findings revealed that CACI is more complicated than traditional CHI, because there is a second person, the customer, involved in the interaction. For example, the agent provides a lot of feedback about the computer to the customer, such as, “I am waiting for the computer” Laboratory experiments were conducted to investigate the customer-computer channel by adding non-verbal auditory feedback about the computer directly to the customers. The findings showed only a small insignificant difference in task completion time and subjective satisfaction. There were indications that there was an improvement in flow of communication. Experiments were conducted to investigate how the two humans interact over two different communication modes: face-to-face and telephone. Findings showed that there was a significantly shorter task completion time via telephone. There was also a difference in style of communication, with face-to-face having more single activities, such as, talking only, while in the telephone condition there were more dual activities, for instance talking while also searching. There was only a small difference in subjective satisfaction. To investigate if the findings from the laboratory experiment also held in a real situation and to identify potential improvement areas, a series of studies were conducted: observations and interviews at multiple travel agencies, one focus group and a proof of concept study at one travel agency. The findings confirmed the results from the laboratory experiments. A number of potential interface improvements were also identified, such as, a history mechanism and sharing part of the computer screen with the customer at the agent's discretion. The results from the work in this thesis suggest that telephone interaction, although containing fewer cues, is not necessarily an impoverished mode of communication. Telephone interaction is less time consuming and more task-focused. Further, adding non-verbal auditory feedback did not enhance the interaction. The findings also suggest that customer service CACI is inherently different in nature and that there are additional complications with traditional CHI issues

Designing for Shareable Interfaces in the Wild

Despite excitement about the potential of interactive tabletops to support collaborative work, there have been few empirical demonstrations of their effectiveness (Marshall et al., 2011). In particular, while lab-based studies have explored the effects of individual design features, there has been a dearth of studies evaluating the success of systems in the wild. For this technology to be of value, designers and systems builders require a better understanding of how to develop and evaluate tabletop applications to be deployed in real world settings. This dissertation reports on two systems designed through a process that incorporated ethnography-style observations, iterative design and in the wild evaluation. The first study focused on collaborative learning in a medical setting. To address the fact that visitors to a hospital emergency ward were leaving with an incomplete understanding of their diagnosis and treatment, a system was prototyped in a working Emergency Room (ER) with doctors and patients. The system was found to be helpful but adoption issues hampered its impact. The second study focused on a planning application for visitors to a tourist information centre. Issues and opportunities for a successful, contextually-fitted system were addressed and it was found to be effective in supporting group planning activities by novice users, in particular, facilitating users’ first experiences, providing effective signage and offering assistance to guide the user through the application. This dissertation contributes to understanding of multi-user systems through literature review of tabletop systems, collaborative tasks, design frameworks and evaluation of prototypes. Some support was found for the claim that tabletops are a useful technology for collaboration, and several issues were discussed. Contributions to understanding in this field are delivered through design guidelines, heuristics, frameworks, and recommendations, in addition to the two case studies to help guide future tabletop system creators

Designing for the Cooperative Use of Multi-user, Multi-device Museum Exhibits.

This work explores software-based museum exhibits that allow groups of visitors to employ their own personal mobile devices as impromptu user interfaces to the exhibits. Personal devices commandeered into service in this fashion are dubbed Opportunistic User Interfaces (O-UIs). Because visitors usually prefer to engage in shared learning experiences, emphasis is placed on how to design software interfaces to support collaborative learning. To study the issue, a Design-Based Research approach was taken to construct an externally valid exemplar of this type of exhibit, while also conducting more traditional experiments on specific features of the O-UI design. Three analyses, of – (1) museums as a context, (2) existing computer-based museum exhibits, and (3) computer support of collaborative processes in both work and classroom contexts – produced guidelines that informed the design of the software-based exhibit created as a testbed for O-UI design. The exhibit was refined via extensive formative testing on a museum floor. The experimental phase of this work examined the impact of O-UI design on (1) the visual attention and (2) collaborative learning behaviors of visitors. Specifically, an O-UI design that did not display any graphical output (the “simple” condition) was contrasted against an O-UI design that displayed multi-element, dynamically animated graphics (the “complex” condition). The “complex” O-UIs promoted poor visual attention management, an effect known as the heads-down phenomenon, wherein visitors get so enmeshed with their O-UIs that they miss out on the shared context, to the detriment of group outcomes. Despite this shortcoming, the “complex” O-UIs better promoted goal awareness, on-task interactions between visitors, and equity in participation and performance. The tight output coupling (visitors see only one shared display) of the “simple” O-UI condition promoted emergent competition, and it encouraged some visitors (especially males) to become more engaged than others. Two design recommendations emerge: (1) incorporating devices with private displays (O-UIs with output) as interfaces to a single large display better promotes collaboration (especially equity), and (2) O-UIs with “complex” displays may be used in museum exhibits, but visitors would benefit from mechanisms to encourage them to direct their attention to the shared display periodically.Ph.D.Computer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/61771/1/ltoth_1.pd