Exploring the potential of unobtrusive proactive task support

✍ Scribed by Ji-Ye Mao; Y.W. Leung

• Book ID: 104359307
• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 2003
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 275 KB
• Volume: 15
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0953-5438
• DOI: 10.1016/s0953-5438(02)00055-3

✦ Synopsis

This research concerns how to make task-related online resources accessible to users in a convenient manner in the context of work. It explores the potential of proactive but relatively unobtrusive task support: based on task progress, advice is displayed in separate and persistently present advice windows side-by-side to the Task Window, and the display is updated intermittently. The proposed approach is illustrated with a prototype, Telephone Triage Assistant (TTA), for supporting junior nurses' triage task. The usefulness and usability of TTA were assessed based on the results of an exploratory study at a medical call centre. Results show that subjects seemed to have spent a significant portion of the task time on TTA, and felt mostly positive about TTA. There was also a great deal of overlap between subjects' line of questioning and advice from TTA.