Designing attention-aware business intelligence and analytics dashboards

The design of user interface is known to influence the users’ attention while they are interacting with applications such as Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) dashboards. BI&A dashboards are considered as critical because they contain a lot of compressed information and managers only spend a little time to process the provided information. Thereby, they need to manage their visual attention properly due to inattentional blindness and change blindness issues. We propose to investigate the design of BI&A dashboards that are sensitive to the users’ attention. So called attention-aware BI&A dashboards are of utmost importance in the field of BI&A systems since attention is known to play a major role in constructing decisions. We motivate our research project and present the initial design of attention-aware BI&A dashboards. Especially the inclusion of eye-tracking technology is an important aspect of our proposed design

Be a Miracle - Designing Conversational Agents to Influence Users’ Intention Regarding Organ Donation

The increasing need for organ donations remains a worldwide challenge as transplant waiting lists grow and donation rates persist at constant levels. The increasing popularity of conversational agents (CAs) has prompted new strategies for educating and persuading individuals to adjust their cognitive and behavioral beliefs and become donors. However, how CAs should be designed to modify uninformed users’ intention to donate remains unclear. Against this background, we conducted an online experiment (N=134) to examine the impact of a human-like CA design on users\u27 intention to become organ donors. Based on the three-factor theory of anthropomorphism and the elaboration likelihood model, we derive three theoretical mechanisms to understand the influence of a CAs human-like design on users’ intention to donate. The findings show that perceived anthropomorphism does not directly impact persuasion and empathy but is mediated via perceived usefulness to influence the intention to donate

Towards an Extended Perception Layer in Augmented Reality

Augmented reality devices overlay digital content above our visually perceived real world and enable new ways of collaboration, communication, interaction, and perception. Extant research explores the conceptual foundations, technical prerequisites, and actual implementation of augmented reality in various domains. We lack a concept explaining the comprehensive range of digital layers in a holistic extended reality environment to understand how, when, and why users, for example, want to access or share information. This paper presents the extended perception layer (XPL) concept serving as the groundwork for users\u27 interaction with augmented reality. The XPL concept describes the differentiation of three digital layers and suggests how accessing information, sharing content, and interacting with each other can be done within the layers. We contribute with the XPL concept and a corresponding research agenda to further explore the possibilities of augmenting users\u27 visual perception

Towards a situation-awareness-driven design of operational business intelligence & analytics systems

With the swamping and timeliness of data in the organizational con-text, the decision maker’s choice of an appropriate decision alternative in a given situation is defied. In particular, operational actors are facing the challenge to meet business-critical decisions in a short time and at high frequency. The con-struct of Situation Awareness (SA) has been established in cognitive psychology as a valid basis for understanding the behavior and decision making of human beings in complex and dynamic systems. SA gives decision makers the possibil-ity to make informed, time-critical decisions and thereby improve the perfor-mance of the respective business process. This research paper leverages SA as starting point for a design science project for Operational Business Intelligence and Analytics systems and suggests a first version of design principles

Designing a Chatbot Social Cue Configuration System

Social cues (e.g., gender, age) are important design features of chatbots. However, choosing a social cue design is challenging. Although much research has empirically investigated social cues, chatbot engineers have difficulties to access this knowledge. Descriptive knowledge is usually embedded in research articles and difficult to apply as prescriptive knowledge. To address this challenge, we propose a chatbot social cue configuration system that supports chatbot engineers to access descriptive knowledge in order to make justified social cue design decisions (i.e., grounded in empirical research). We derive two design principles that describe how to extract and transform descriptive knowledge into a prescriptive and machine-executable representation. In addition, we evaluate the prototypical instantiations in an exploratory focus group and at two practitioner symposia. Our research addresses a contemporary problem and contributes with a generalizable concept to support researchers as well as practitioners to leverage existing descriptive knowledge in the design of artifacts

The Evolution of Design Principles Enabling Knowledge Reuse for Projects: An Action Design Research Project

Knowledge is a fuzzy phenomenon and managing it a complex endeavor. In particular, knowledge reuse possesses the possibility to increase project performance since project teams can benefit from knowledge of former projects. Therefore, knowledge reuse is an essential knowledge management (KM) process phase that needs to receive special attention. Studying KM in general requires one to consider both social and technical aspects. On the one hand, KM highly depends on individuals, their interactions with each other, organizational rules, and cultural aspects forming KM’s social perspective. On the other hand, contemporary information technologies promise to support organizations, teams, and individuals in managing what they know. Today, the KM research field is tremendous and full of social and technical insights. However, independent of which aspect of KM is studied, most researchers follow either a technology-driven approach for building innovative KM technologies or a behavioral-research approach to observe and understand complex KM phenomena. Few papers report the design of a KM system that integrates the social and technical perspective by expressing and evaluating design principles according the design science research approach. In this paper, we address this challenge and present a comprehensive action design research (ADR) project in the context of managing project knowledge reuse. Thereby, we present our KMS artifact called Just KNow and discuss the entire process from specifying its requirements to its implementation step by step. This paper helps KM researchers and practitioners make informed decisions. We support researchers in deciding whether the ADR approach is appropriate for their particular research project and provide a guideline for how to apply ADR. We support practitioners by helping them make design decisions when creating and implementing an effective KMS

I did use it! - Assessing subjective vs objective cognitive artifact usage

For decades, IS researchers have discussed the reliability of subjective measurements to assess actual artifact usage. Especially in experimental settings, as in the design science context for instance, the participants’ usage data of the evaluated artifact represents an important point of analysis. However, collecting objective usage data, (i.e. logfiles) is often not feasible depending on the artifact. In this paper, we present the theoretical grounding of collecting cognitive artifact usage data using eye-tracking technology. Grounded in immediacy and eye-mind assumption the participants’ artifact fixations are used as objective usage measurement. The question remains if in comparison, the collection of subjective (e.g. perceptual) usage data is sufficient and reliable for such experiments. The results of our comparative analysis indicate that researchers could use subjective measurements when comparing different artifact designs and should rely on objective measurements when testing the effect of an artifact compared to a control group without artifacts

Digital Facilitation Assistance for Collaborative, Creative Design Processes

People focus more and more on creating innovations collaboratively. Digital assistants (DAs) can accelerate such collaborative, creative design processes by supporting people in their work. Especially in the context of design, such as design thinking, moderators that facilitate collaborative, creative workshops can benefit from the support for their teams and themselves in the form of a DA. Based on interviews with experienced workshop facilitators from research and practice, we discuss implications for the design and usage of DAs in collaborative, creative design processes. We identify 16 distinct capabilities of DAs for task, process and interaction facilitation to guide design research and practitioners’ endeavors toward helpful automated DT facilitation support. Moreover, we outline a research agenda to foster future research on this young research area