Studying Group Decision Making in Affinity Diagramming

Affinity diagramming is a commonly used contextual design practice for which many tools have been developed. However, experts and novices alike eschew tool use, instead using traditional paper and whiteboard methods. This paper presents observations of traditional affinity diagramming sessions, focusing on three areas of consideration—shared awareness, cognitive offloading, and understanding, organizing and searching—that are important for collaborative tools. Specific design requirements for each of these three areas are described

Examining the effects of Lighting Effects on Peripheral Devices for Visual User Notifications

The ubiquitous and pervasive use of lighting effects embedded into peripheral hardware has gained popularity through it’s use in Triple-A video game titles such as Call of Duty and the availability of software development kits (SDK) from leading manufacturers. A preliminary NASA TLX experiment was performed to examine the effect that notifications displayed on a peripheral device has, in comparison to traditional dialog notifications. This research will prove useful to create notification design guidance for these devices

Supporting dynamic change detection: using the right tool for the task

Detecting task-relevant changes in a visual scene is necessary for successfully monitoring and managing dynamic command and control situations. Change blindness—the failure to notice visual changes—is an important source of human error. Change History EXplicit (CHEX) is a tool developed to aid change detection and maintain situation awareness; and in the current study we test the generality of its ability to facilitate the detection of changes when this subtask is embedded within a broader dynamic decision-making task. A multitasking air-warfare simulation required participants to perform radar-based subtasks, for which change detection was a necessary aspect of the higher-order goal of protecting one’s own ship. In this task, however, CHEX rendered the operator even more vulnerable to attentional failures in change detection and increased perceived workload. Such support was only effective when participants performed a change detection task without concurrent subtasks. Results are interpreted in terms of the NSEEV model of attention behavior (Steelman, McCarley, & Wickens, Hum. Factors 53:142–153, 2011; J. Exp. Psychol. Appl. 19:403–419, 2013), and suggest that decision aids for use in multitasking contexts must be designed to fit within the available workload capacity of the user so that they may truly augment cognition

Supporting Requirements Reuse in Notification Systems Design through Task Modeling

In hierarchical task analysis, designers study and decompose the tasks users perform while interacting with a system. Overlooking task analysis can have serious consequences on the design outcome. By making tasks clear to the designers, we can leverage an in-depth understanding of a usage scenario. Resulting from task analysis is a task model that explicitly enumerates the low-level tasks and activities a user can perform with a piece of software. Our first challenge was to identify a design space (notification systems) and knowledge storage approach (claims). By attaching claims to tasks in a hierarchical task analysis, the model creates a visualization of relationships, embodying the system requirements. Successfully adapting task modeling to model notification tasks shows promise in benefiting the requirements analysis of notification system design and promoting reuse. This paper describes a procedure and instantiation of hierarchical task analysis, to help designers identify the most important aspects to focus design and to support reuse of design knowledge within and between projects. The results of our usability study make us confident that users are able to understand the processes of task modeling if provided with sufficient help