Visualizing Magnitude: Graphical Number Representations Help Users Detect Large Number Entry Errors

Nurses frequently have to program infusion pumps to deliver a prescribed quantity of drug over time. Occasional errors are made in the performance of this routine number entry task, resulting in patients receiving the incorrect dose of a drug. While many of these number entry errors are inconsequential, others are not; infusing 100 ml of a drug instead of 10 ml can be fatal. This paper investigates whether a supplementary graphical number representation, depicting the magnitude of a number, can help people detect number entry errors. An experiment was conducted in which 48 participants had to enter numbers from a ‘prescription sheet’ to a computer interface using a keyboard. The graphical representation was supplementary and was shown both on the ‘prescription sheet’ and the device interface. Results show that while overall more errors were made when the graphical representation was visible, the graphical representation helped participants to detect larger number entry errors (i.e., those that were out by at least an order of magnitude). This work suggests that a graphical number entry system that visualizes magnitude of number can help people detect serious number entry errors

Visual grouping in menu interfaces

Menu interfaces often arrange options into semantic groups. This semantic structure is then usually conveyed to the user by supplementary visual grouping cues. We investigate whether these visual grouping cues actually help users locate items in menus faster, and whether there is potential for these powerful grouping cues to impede search when used inappropriately. Thirty-six participants performed known-item searches of word menus. These menus differed along three dimensions: (1) whether visual grouping cues were used, (2) whether items were semantically organized, and (3) the number of items belonging to each semantic group. Results show that the usefulness of visual grouping entirely depends on the underlying semantic structure of the menu. When menus were semantically organized, having visual grouping cues delineate the boundaries between large semantic groups resulted in the fastest search times. But when semantically unrelated items were visually grouped together, participants took far longer to locate targets. Menu designers should therefore take great care to avoid visually grouping semantically unrelated items as this has the potential to hinder menu interactions

Diminished Control in Crowdsourcing: An Investigation of Crowdworker Multitasking Behavior

Obtaining high-quality data from crowds can be difficult if contributors do not give tasks sufficient attention. Attention checks are often used to mitigate this problem, but, because the roots of inattention are poorly understood, checks often compel attentive contributors to complete unnecessary work. We investigated a potential source of inattentiveness during crowdwork: multitasking. We found that workers switched to other tasks every five minutes, on average. There were indications that increasing switch frequency negatively affected performance. To address this, we tested an intervention that encouraged workers to stay focused on our task after multitasking was detected. We found that our intervention reduced the frequency of task-switching. It also improves on existing attention checks because it does not place additional demands on workers who are already focused. Our approach shows that crowds can help to overcome some of the limitations of laboratory studies by affording access to naturalistic multitasking behavior

Batching, Error Checking and Data Collecting: Understanding Data Entry in a Financial Office

Data entry is a core computing activity performed by office workers every day. Prior research on this topic has tended to study data entry in controlled lab environments. In this paper, we interviewed nine financial administrators from two large universities to learn about their practices for conducting data entry work. We found that financial information often has to be retrieved from multiple electronic and paper sources, and involves briefly keeping items in memory when switching between sources. Interviewees reported that they batched a lot of data entry tasks into a single session to complete the work quickly, and mitigated the risk of data entry errors by time-consuming practices of double-checking. However, prior lab studies suggest that double-checking is a poor strategy as it takes time and people are poor at spotting errors. This work has implications for how future data entry research should be conducted

Game & Watch: Are "Let's Play" Gaming Videos as Immersive as Playing Games?

Let's Play videos, where players record themselves playing games, are a new and popular way of experiencing game content. To investigate the experience of watching Let's Play videos, we had 40 participants watch a video of someone playing a racing game. The same participants also played the racing game and watched footage of an actual racing event. After each media experience, participants completed a modified version of the Immersive Experience Questionnaire (IEQ). Results show that IEQ scores were highest after participants played the game, and lowest after passively watching the non-gaming content; watching the Let's Play video was in between. When watching the Let's Play video, participants who were familiar with the game had lower IEQ scores than participants who were new to the game. These results show that actively controlling a game generates a deeper immersive experience than passively watching others play - watching is not as immersive as playing

Looking Up Information in Email: Feedback on Visit Durations Discourages Distractions

Data entry often involves looking up information from email. Task switching to email can be disruptive, and people can get distracted and forget to return to their primary task. In this paper, we investigate whether giving people feedback on how long they are away has any effect on the duration and number of their switches. An online experiment was conducted in which participants had to enter numeric codes into an online spreadsheet. They had to look up these codes in an email sent to their personal email upon starting the experiment. People who were shown how long they were away for made shorter switches, were faster to complete the task and made fewer data entry errors. This suggests feedback on switching duration may make people more aware of their switching behaviour, and assist users in maintaining focus on their main task

Disengaged From Planning During the Lockdown? An Interview Study in an Academic Setting

This article reports the results of a repeated interview study with 15 knowledge workers in academia during the first COVID-19 lockdown (April–July 2020). The focus of these interviews was to understand how people adjusted to working from home and the impact this had on their planning routines, strategies, and use of tools. Common themes reveal that work was chaotic, participants lost focus, and felt overworked and tired. Many disengaged from their planning routines and were reluctant to plan work in detail. However, those who reflected on how efficiently they were spending their time, found two planning strategies—breaking down tasks and manual time tracking—effective at improving accuracy of plans and productivity. Participants did not start using any new planning tools instead they adapted their existing ones. Design implications for planning tools in the context of the future of work and prevention of planning disengagement are discussed

To Plan or Not to Plan? A Mixed-Methods Diary Study Examining When, How and Why Knowledge Work Planning is Inaccurate.

Reliable and accurate planning is essential for modern knowledge workers. However, there is limited insight about when, how and why planning is inaccurate, and the circumstances in which those inaccuracies are troublesome. To investigate this, we asked 20 academics to keep a diary for a single work day. They estimated the duration of the tasks they wanted to achieve at the start of the day and noted down in detail the tasks they actually achieved during the day. Semi-structured interviews were conducted to complement this diary data. The diaries showed that some tasks, such as email and coding, were more susceptible to time underestimation bias while other tasks, such as writing and planning, were more susceptible to time overestimation bias in planning. Based on interviews, a typology of common reasons for delays in planned daily work is presented. It suggests that vague and optimistic planning leads to the observed discrepancy between planned and actual work. Finally, interviews suggested that participants adopted four planning strategies that vary in the frequency of planning, from minimal planning to daily, weekly and multi-level planning. We close by discussing ways support systems for accurate planning can be better designed for different use cases

Assessing the Viability of Online Interruption Studies

Researchers have been collecting data online since the early days of the Internet and as technology improves, increasing numbers of traditional experiments are being run online. However, there are still questions about the kinds of experiments that work online, particularly over experiments with time-sensitive performance measures. We are interested in one time-sensitive measure specifically, the time taken to resume a task following an interruption. We ran participants through an archetypal interruption study online and in the lab. Statistical comparisons showed no significant differences in the time it took to resume following an interruption. However, there were issues with data quality that stemmed from participant confusion about the task. Our findings have implications for experiments that assess time-sensitive performance measures in tasks that require continuous attention

Dividing Attention Between Tasks: Testing Whether Explicit Payoff Functions Elicit Optimal Dual-Task Performance

We test people's ability to optimize performance across two concurrent tasks. Participants performed a number entry task while controlling a randomly moving cursor with a joystick. Participants received explicit feedback on their performance on these tasks in the form of a single combined score. This payoff function was varied between conditions to change the value of one task relative to the other. We found that participants adapted their strategy for interleaving the two tasks, by varying how long they spent on one task before switching to the other, in order to achieve the near maximum payoff available in each condition. In a second experiment, we show that this behavior is learned quickly (within 2-3 min over several discrete trials) and remained stable for as long as the payoff function did not change. The results of this work show that people are adaptive and flexible in how they prioritize and allocate attention in a dual-task setting. However, it also demonstrates some of the limits regarding people's ability to optimize payoff functions