When Information Technology Design Favors Form over Function: Where is the Value-Added “Tipping Point”?

Performing usability analysis early in the design process results in lower overall development, deployment, and maintenance costs. Pre-development user and task analysis through questionnaires, observation, low-fidelity prototyping, and usability testing enables productive interactive testing of subsequent operable system prototypes. This helps assure a positive return on investment in information technology. When usercentered design assessment is supplanted by assumptions about user, task, and work environment, the result is often production of applications embellished with functionality unrelated to the user’s task. Surveys were administered to elicit user perception of system usability and usefulness and of satisfaction with intra-team interaction. This was the first step in determining the relationship between form and function for users of a Synchronous Distributed- Decision Support System (SD-DSS). It was anticipated that the teamwork process would be most troublesome while the SD-DSS would be perceived as easy to use and functional. The reverse proved to be the case

Web-Based Resource Coordination for Effective Distributed Collaborative Decision Making ABSTRACT

Effective use of Web applications by distributed heterogeneous work teams depends on team ability to effectively discover, retrieve, and coordinate technological and human resources. Successful process and product delivery also depend on both push and pull delivery of information to meet both ad hoc and ongoing information resource needs. The described research extends current theory by analyzing resource coordination requirements during distributed decision-making under time and resource constraints. Results of this work suggest the real design, implementation, application, and diagnostic usefulness of an enhanced model of team process where development of a shared mental model serves as a portal to and mediator of distributed situated cognition

Emergence of Shared Mental Models During Distributed Teamwork: Integration of Distributed Cognition Traces

Team decision-making becomes more complex when problem specifications and availability of resources change over time. Time constraints may also amplify complexity. Ad hoc team response to this type of change can be studied over time by analyzing distributed cognitive traces and emergence of resource coordination response patterns during the team decision process. Knowledge of team work style patterns gained through such analysis provides criteria for design of adaptive collaborative work systems and development of more effective use patterns. 1 Motivation for the Study Research efforts have focused variously on individually held abstract concepts becoming shared (Cannon-Bowers & Salas, 2001; Langan-Fox, Code, Langfield-Smith, 2000; Levesque, Wilson, & Wholey, 2001) and distributed cognition as an approach to group problem solving (Zhang, 1998). A framework has been suggested for use of distributed cognition as a way to describe interaction (Wright, Fields, & Harrison, 2000). However, I know of no other work attempting to demonstrate, as is the case here, how ad hoc coordination of resources, supervised by a team’s emergent shared mental model, is facilitated by synthesis of emergent distributed cognitive traces. The post-interaction residue left throughout a work or learning environment is a set of cognitive fragments. A transcript of the interaction that occurred over a period of time makes up a set of traces. Traces, in the form of digital artifacts, are footprints that define the path of interaction and resource coordination taken by a team. The emergence of patterns can be tracked over time as teams structure a decision model in response to changing requirements, complexity, time constraints, and availability of resources. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate how distributed cognitive traces stored in environmental artifacts are joined through discourse to form sufficient shared cognition to negotiate production of a satisfactory decision model.