Emerging Needs and Opportunities for Human Factors Research (1995) / Chapter Skim
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11 Aiding Intellectual Work
11 Aiding Intellectual Work
Pages 291-321
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The Problem The problem focused on in this chapter is how to carry out human factors research aimed at augmenting human intellectual work with electronic aids. Aids include artifacts or tools, as well as procedures, techniques, organizational structures, and facilitated, encouraged communication patterns.
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Some widely used electronic aids have not helped much. Nevertheless, there is the belief, supported by informal evidence, that electronic aids, if developed with users and their work organizations in mind, do enhance productivity and creativity and can allow people to work in new ways.
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, and they can help identify aids that can effectively help people with specific intellectual deficiencies compensate for what is latent or missing. Our Expanding Technology Makes It Easier to Do Rapid advances in electronic technology provide opportunities to improve existing intellectual aids, create effective and unforeseen new ones, and reduce costs, thereby bringing heretofore expensive aids to larger audiences.
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Several studies used as examples to illustrate one human factors research strategy can, from a different angle, be used to illustrate one of the other research strategies. Assessing Existing Intellectual Aids Today, little experimental and formal empirical evidence exists as to the impact of various electronic aids on individual worker and organizational productivity.
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. Future human factors research should assess existing, ubiquitous intellectual aids to learn how well, if at all, they aid human intellectual performance and productivity; to understand more deeply how they affect people's minds and the productivity of their work organizations; and to use the results as insights in defining new aids that would be valuable.
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If not, then these recommended processes can be modified. Experimental assessment of intellectual aids could help identify the cognitive implications of widely used aids.
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FIGURE 11.1 Key points in designing experiments to assess existing intellectual aids. letters with each method studied.
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, people experienced at using dictation equipment did not dictate several times faster than they wrote. Indeed, eight business executives who dictated regularly for years dictated routine business letters about 60 percent faster than they wrote them (p < .001)
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, whereas dictation has declined. Composing With Text Editors In the 1970s, office professionals began using text editors to compose their own memos and documents -- and to create the final text versions without the aid of secretaries.
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Human factors research should not just question the value of existing aids but, whenever possible and perhaps aided by theory, find something that is a good replacement. Speaking documents as a method of composition was so identified.
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It shows an excitement to get started, a motivation to focus on existing aids. It articulates theories of mental mechanisms involved in using common aids.
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While lacking some of the control of laboratory experiments, empirical field studies can assess whether individual productivity, measured in the laboratory, translates into organizational productivity and can also take into account contextual variables. Kraut et al.
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A combination of experimental laboratory work and empirical field studies to assess various aids for group work is a valuable human factors approach. One such approach was carried out by Judy and Gary Olson (Olson et al., 1992:91)
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(1992) carried out an ethnographic study of air traffic controllers in the United Kingdom.
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• Have workers think aloud while they work. • Videotape workers doing their jobs with and without intellectual aids.
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FIGURE 11.4 Key points in studying ongoing intellectual work for the purposes of identifying the characteristics of useful intellectual aids. lists some informal ones; these are described more fully in Gould (1988)
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His two main conclusions (1983:99) , which have implications for the design of intellectual aids, were the following:
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, versus the need to design electronic aids that allow people to work in relatively new ways. Communication in Software Development Organizations Probably millions of people are employed in system development work.
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(1988) show how human factors researchers can investigate very large task domains through surveys, visits, observations, and interviews.
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One task for human factors researchers is to figure out how to get people to internalize the research conclusion in this area so that it affects their behavior. McCauley (1991)
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RESEARCH NEED AND STRATEGY 3: INTERDISCIPLINARY DEVELOPMENT WORK Human factors researchers, to date, have been more likely to assess the value of an aid developed by others (e.g., the studies under strategy 1) than to join with others to develop an aid and then carefully assess its value and
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It is hard to find examples of human factors researchers who, by themselves, develop effective electronic aids. Making good electronic aids requires many disciplines.
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There has been a start toward giving this work professional recognition. Case studies describing innovative research and development efforts involving human factors researchers in advanced development work exist, including Xerox's Star system (Smith et al., 1982)
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They concluded that a significant human factors problem is to develop an electronic text system that people will use to better advantage than a standard printed book. Because of experimental results on the use of command languages and navigational tools, as well as results related to other relevant cognitive issues they had been studying (summarized in Landauer et al., 1993)
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Full text indexing returns a superset of desired items, as they had already found, but the dynamic table of contents, they reasoned, should provide contexts to help users narrow this superset of items to those that are relevant to their intentions. So they built a prototype, and used it themselves (Landauer et al., 1993:98)
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Human factors researchers, like experts in other disciplines, can be overenthusiastic about their own inventions when empirical data are absent. Development of a successful aid usually takes a long time.
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Human factors researchers could take the initiative to extend other existing behavioral and cognitive knowledge to applied domains (a task much harder than many experimental and cognitive psychologists generally suppose)
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(1993) studies provide an excellent example of extending one's own cognitive findings to the design of a real electronic aid.
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1991 In the Mind's Eye: Enhancing Human Performance. Committee on Techniques for the Enhancement of Human Performance, National Research Council.
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1992 Cost-justifying human factors support on software development projects. Human Factors Society Bulletin 35(11)
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1979 Evaluation of Computer Text Editors. Unpublished PhD dissertation.
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