I have recently been experiencing a number of irritating yet unrelated problems with my technology. My laptop touchpad has developed a fault which means that every few clicks (but not a consistent number), it decides that I really meant a double click. Of course the factor which makes this particularly annoying is that the second click can do anything from shut what I've just opened to deleting emails without troubling me with their content. Our technology support people and the manufacturer have both had one unsuccessful attempt to fix it and in the meantime I am struggling along with an external mouse. This certainly adds to the hassle of working on the train (and don't start me on the unreliability of the train service into London which is another significant source of stress).
Last night, my home internet connection decided to become erratic and after a lengthy discussion with the helpdesk, we concluded that the thunderstorms may have affected my phone lines and that I should probably go looking for a frayed wire outside sometime. The rain has stopped and the internet is working again so I'll probably forget about it till the next time.
Whilst both these incidents were extremely irritating, it's not the incidents themselves that I wish to comment on. What I find intriguing is how personal and distressing being deprived of technology feels. It seems to be far more anxiety provoking than the facts would suggest. My laptop was pretty well backed up and switching to a substitute for a while was merely irritating. I was only checking a weather forecast on my home internet and I could still access business critical emails via my phone or 3G card on my laptop.
So why do we feel so upset when technology breaks down? I think there are two main components – we rely on it and we do not know how to fix it.
We have become dependent on technology and rely on it to support the way we live. We rely on mobile phones to allow us to leave arrangements to the last minute, to rearrange our appointments and to provide us with up to date information at the touch of a button (sorry I was getting carried away with the marketing hype – what I should have said was to provide us with up to date information after struggling with a few unintelligible menus and pressing buttons designed for children). In fact, even our jobs may be dependent on computer technology. I remember researching the impact of computers on work in the nineteen seventies and one of the big concerns was that computers would put everyone out of work. In practice, many skills did indeed become redundant especially typographers and typists. But, when I look round today, as a business consultant who is engaged with a wide range of industries, I am struck by how many industries rely totally on computer technology for their very existence – from low cost airlines to on-line retailers to free commuter newspapers. One of the biggest industries which relies on computer technology is the mobile communications industry. The technology is not just in the phones (which seem to have more computing power than the Apollo spacecraft) but also in the networks and infrastructure which are necessary to allow them to operate. The first set of papers in this issue of Behaviour and Information Technology looks at mobile working and its impact on people from the effectiveness of adverts on cell phones to the best way to scroll on a small screen.
The second reason why technology failures are so painful is that we often do not know how to fix them. Actually, that's not quite true. The problem is that we nearly know how to fix them. Over the years, most of us pick up a variety of problem solving and bug fixing skills or at least a set of handy ‘work arounds’ to get what we want from technology. When something goes wrong, we gradually work our way through our favourites starting with switching it all off and on again (surprisingly often successful and usually the first thing a help desk will tell you to do). If this does not work, we get deeper and deeper into unknown territory until we either succeed (with no idea what we did that worked) or find ourselves stuck. It's a bit like following GPS instructions and then having the battery fail. Because we were using the GPS, we have not really bothered to keep track of when we turned or where we were heading. When the battery fails we are truly lost. I think it's this feeling of complete helplessness, which is so personal and distressing. This is why it is so important for system providers to ensure that their systems are usable in the real world and that users do not get lost or confused by their systems. The second set of papers in this issue addresses such topics.
The last paper deals with the growing problem of keeping networks safe.
Mobile and media
In the first paper in this issue of BIT, Taezoon Park, Rashmi Shenoy and Gavriel Salvendy from the School of Industrial Engineering at Purdue University in the USA report a literature review on advertising using mobile phones. They analysed 53 case studies and identified a framework which they believe will help advertisers understand this new medium.
Meanwhile, ‘across the pond’ from the USA in Finland, T. Koivumaki, A. Ristola and M. Kesti from the Department of Marketing at the University of Oulu explored the effects of the information quality of mobile information services on user satisfaction and service acceptance. They found that although content quality was important for all users it was particularly significant for users, who are using the mobile information for entertainment and enjoyment (they call them hedonic users) rather than more utilitarian purposes (they call them utilitarian users).
One of the undeniable limitations of mobile devices is that the displays are inevitably smaller than would be ideal for the types of tasks we expect to perform. In most cases, this means that users will need to scroll, probably both horizontally as well as vertically. Frodke Eika Sandnes from the Faculty of Engineering, Oslo University College, Norway found that users have a tendency to scroll more from left-to-right than from right-to-left in a text entry task (for English language text). However, since users did also use the right-to-left functionality at times, he recommends providing bidirectional scrolling functionality, where possible, in the user interfaces on constrained mobile devices.
Of course, we tend to assume that less constrained interfaces on full sized devices are inevitably better. However, we have all experienced being bombarded by visual effects and clips during presentations where the message got lost in an excessive use of multi-media. But, properly used, one would expect video clips to add more value than audio only clips in communicating information. Bruce Christie and Jenny Collyer from the Department of Computing, Communications Technology and Mathematics, at London Metropolitan University in the UK report a series of experiments where they investigated this systematically in commercially available CD Roms. They found that for all groups, clips with a visual component as well as audio were judged to contain more information and to be more interesting than audio-only clips. There was also some evidence that the visual component increased subjects' confidence in what they could remember. They conclude that training in media literacy may help developers to use the visual component more effectively and prevent it detracting from the main message.
Improving usability
I have long believed that involving users in development not only improves ‘buy-in’ and engagement with the resulting system but also improves system quality. T. McGill from the School of IT at Murdoch University in Australia and J. Kloba from the Graduate School of Management, University of Western Australia, Australia and Università Bocconi in Milan, Italy report a study which investigated the role of involvement in system success. Participation resulted in greater success on all the measures.
Another of my beliefs is that many people have an unduly simplistic view of usability - thinking that it is the same as making systems easy for everyone. I also believe that lawyers are not like everyone else and are generally incapable of using simple understandable language. D. R. Newman and U. Doherty from Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland report a study which aimed to help design an environment in which professionals without legal training could make effective use of public sector legal information on planning and the environment. They found that non-lawyers reported twice as many difficulties as those with legal training. They also found that the non-lawyers had surprisingly few problems understanding legal terminology but had more problems understanding the syntactical structure of legal documents and collections. They say their results support the constraint attunement hypothesis (CAH) of the effects of expertise on information retrieval, and that this has implications for the design of information systems.
Staying with my own views for a moment longer, I find that the adaptively shortened pull down menus, which were introduced by Microsoft in Office 2000 sometimes confuse me rather than speed up menu selection. Sebastian Fischer and Stephan Schwan from the Institut fűr Wissensmedien – Knowledge Media Research Center, in Tűbingen, Germany, agree and found that moving the location of items actually leads to increased selection times and error rates. In their experiment, they also included menus with gaps to allow for the effect of distance. The standard menu came out best in their experiment (with 31 participants) compared with the adaptive and the gapped menu.
Network safety
Despite the proliferation of viruses and other ‘malware’, many people do not take sufficient safety precautions when using the internet. Doohwang Lee and Robert Larose from the Department of Telecommunication, Information Studies and Media and Nora Rifon from the Department of Advertising, Public Relations, and Retailing, both at Michigan State University in the USA surveyed 273 college students to explore their anti-virus software use. Their results suggest that perceived self-efficacy in using virus protection measures and the perceived response efficacy of virus protective measures were both important factors. They concluded that those who are in charge of information security management should not only concentrate their efforts into increasing individuals' awareness of the likelihood of virus attacks, but also conduct interventions aimed at increasing self-efficacy and response efficacy beliefs.