New Frontiers in Usability for Users' Complex Knowledge Work
Journal of Usability Studies, Volume 3, Issue 4, August 2008, pp. 149-151
Article Contents
Two years ago, Mike Albers organized and held a workshop on the usability challenges of computer-supported complex work. The enthusiasm generated by that workshop led to this special issue of Journal of Usability Studies (JUS). This special issue explores the problem of how to make human-computer interactions simpler for dynamic knowledge work. Along these lines, many experts in exploratory analysis agree that answering the following questions is a top priority for the coming decades:
- Why is support for knowledge work so distinctively challenging?
- What does it take to achieve high quality design?
- How is quality demonstrated and best assessed in regard to usefulness and usability?
The three articles in this issue take an important first step in tackling these questions. All of them strive to clarify why knowledge work is distinctively challenging by understanding how people perform their complex work. The authors of all three articles find that work typically considered well-structured is, in fact, not well-structured. Moreover, mistakenly supporting it as such has the following adverse effects:
- Users are confident in work that is inaccurate.
- Users misapply tool capabilities that results in sub-optimal results.
- Users do not deem a system valuable and therefore stop using it.
To identify support that users need but do not get from their technologies, all three articles address certain decision points in users' work. The articles examine users' complex tasks and decisions at very different scales, in distinct domains, and with varying attention to levels of expertise. Yet they share the following findings and themes:
- In decision making under uncertainty, seeking information and turning it into knowledge are vital parts of the decision process.
- During decision episodes, people integrate formal and informal approaches.
- Technologies and their built-in information and task models are not suitably matched to users' actual informal ways of knowing, their transitions between formal and informal approaches, or their processes and needs for integrating formal and informal approaches.
- Successful task performance depends on this integration. Experts expect to do it readily.