Dissertation Information for Daniel Craig McFarlaneNAME:
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SCHOOL: ADVISORS: COMMITTEE MEMBERS: MPACT Status: Incomplete - Not_Inspected Title: Interruption of people in human-computer interaction Abstract: Just because something is new and clever does not necessarily mean that it is good. The utility of a technology must be evaluated strictly in terms of whether it actually helps people succeed. A new technology that is useful for isolated tasks may carry an invisible and costly side-EFFECT.For example, the side-effect of human interruption by machine only manifests itself in real world contexts where people normally perform several complex heterogeneous tasks in parallel. The telephone and email are examples. They are useful by themselves, but in a real work environment they also create annoying interruptions. A newer and more problematic example is the technology of semi-autonomous computer systems such as intelligent agents. These systems can be assigned to do useful things in the background while their human users work on other tasks. However, when an intelligent agent must initiate an interaction with its user it has to first interrupt them from whatever else they are doing. Interruption of people during human-computer interaction (HCI) is problematic because people have cognitive limitations that restrict their ability to work during interruptions. These limitations can cause people to make critical, even life-threatening mistakes when interrupted. Unfortunately, no user interface design guidelines exist for directing solutions to this problem. In fact, no general theoretical tools exist for facilitating basic interdisciplinary investigations of this problem. This dissertation creates two fundamental interdisciplinary theoretical tools for addressing this problem: (1) a Definition of Human Interruption; and (2) a Taxonomy of Human Interruption. These tools are synthesized from the results of a comprehensive analysis of the existing literature of several relevant fields. The utility of these new tools was partially validated by demonstrations of their usefulness. First, the taxonomy was used to structure a discussion of existing literature from several different disciplines relevant to the design of user interfaces for the human interruption problem. Second, the taxonomy was used to guide an experiment with 36 human subjects. The taxonomy guided the creation of a theory-based hypothesis about how to coordinate human interruption during HCI. The results conclusively supported the hypothesis. |
MPACT Scores for Daniel Craig McFarlaneA = 0 Advisors and Advisees Graphgenerating graph, please reload |
Students under Daniel Craig McFarlane
ADVISEES:
- None
COMMITTEESHIPS:
- Protima Banerjee - Drexel University (2009)