Although interruptions are daily occurring events for most working people, little research has been done on the impacts of interruptions on workers and their performance. This study examines the e Vects of interruptions on task performance and its regulation, as well as on workers’ psychological and psychophysiological state. Two parallel experiments were carried out in the Netherlands and in Russia, using a common conceptual framework and overlapping designs. Employees with relevant work experience carried out realistic text editing tasks in a simulated o Yce environment, while the frequency and complexity of interruptions were experimentally manipulated. It was hypothesized that interruptions: (i) would cause a deterioration of performance; (ii) evoke strategies to partially compensate for this deterioration; (iii) aVect subjects’ emotions and well-being negatively; and (iv) raise the level of eVort and activation. It was also hypothesized that greater frequency and complexity of interruptions would enhance the expected e Vects. The hypotheses are only partially cone rmed. The results show that, contrary to what was expected, interruptions cause people to perform the main task faster while maintaining the level of quality. Participants develop strategies enabling them to deal e Vectively with the interruptions, while actually over-compensating the potential performance decline. Interruptions do have a negative impact on emotion and well-being, and lead to an increase of e Vort expenditure, although not to an increase in activation. Thus the improved performance is achieved at the expense of higher psychological costs. Greater complexity evoked more favourable responses among the Dutch participants and more unfavourable ones among the Russian participants. These diVerences are interpreted in terms of the participants’ professional background. The research demonstrates that the e Vects of interruptions reach beyond the execution of additional tasks and the change of work strategies. Interruptions appear to have an after-e Vect, ine uencing the workers’ subsequent readiness to perform. Detailed analysis of the activity in the interruption interval, focusing on

Temporal factors in mental work: effects on interrupted activities

The first International and Interdisciplinary Conference on Modeling and Using Context (CONTEXT-97) was held at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil on February 4–6 1997. This article provides a summary of the presentations and discussions during the three days with a focus on context in applications. The notion of context is far from defined, and is dependent in its interpretation on a cognitive science versus an engineering (or system building) point of view. However, the conference makes it possible to identify new trends in the formalization of context at a theoretical level, as well as in the use of context in real-world applications. Results presented at the conference are ascribed in the realm of the works on context over the past few years at specific workshops and symposia. The diversity of the attendees' origins (artificial intelligence, linguistics, philosophy, psychology, etc.) demonstrates that there are different types of context, not a unique one. For instance, logicians model context at the level of the knowledge representation and the reasoning mechanisms, while cognitive scientists consider context at the level of the interaction between two agents (i.e. two humans or a human and a machine). In the latter case, there are now strong arguments proving that one can speak of context only in reference to its use (e.g. context of an item or of a problem solving exercise). Moreover, there are different types of context that are interdependent. This makes it possible to understand why, despite the consensus on some context aspects, agreement on the notion of context is not yet achieved.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0269888998004044

Modeling and Using Context

Two parallel phenomena are gaining attention in human–computer interaction research: gamification and crowdsourcing Because crowdsourcing's success depends on a mass of motivated crowdsourcees, crowdsourcing platforms have increasingly been imbued with motivational design features borrowed from games; a practice often called gamification While the body of literature and knowledge of the phenomenon have begun to accumulate, we still lack a comprehensive and systematic understanding of conceptual foundations, knowledge of how gamification is used in crowdsourcing, and whether it is effective We first provide a conceptual framework for gamified crowdsourcing systems in order to understand and conceptualize the key aspects of the phenomenon The paper's main contributions are derived through a systematic literature review that investigates how gamification has been examined in different types of crowdsourcing in a variety of domains This meticulous mapping, which focuses on all aspects in our framework, enables us to infer what kinds of gamification efforts are effective in different crowdsourcing approaches as well as to point to a number of research gaps and lay out future research directions for gamified crowdsourcing systems Overall, the results indicate that gamification has been an effective approach for increasing crowdsourcing participation and the quality of the crowdsourced work; however, differences exist between different types of crowdsourcing: the research conducted in the context of crowdsourcing of homogenous tasks has most commonly used simple gamification implementations, such as points and leaderboards, whereas crowdsourcing implementations that seek diverse and creative contributions employ gamification with a richer set of mechanics

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Gamified crowdsourcing: Conceptualization, literature review, and future agenda

Context Since its inception around 2010, gamification has become one of the top technology and software trends. However, gamification has also been regarded as one of the most challenging areas of software engineering. Beyond traditional software design requirements, designing gamification requires the command of disciplines such as (motivational/behavioral) psychology, game design, and narratology, making the development of gamified software a challenge for traditional software developers. Gamification software inhabits a finely tuned niche of software engineering that seeks for both high functionality and engagement; beyond technical flawlessness, gamification has to motivate and affect users. Consequently, it has also been projected that most gamified software is doomed to fail. Objective This paper seeks to advance the understanding of designing gamification and to provide a comprehensive method for developing gamified software. Method We approach the research problem via a design science research approach; firstly, by synthesizing the current body of literature on gamification design methods and by interviewing 25 gamification experts, producing a comprehensive list of design principles for developing gamified software. Secondly, and more importantly, we develop a detailed method for engineering of gamified software based on the gathered knowledge and design principles. Finally, we conduct an evaluation of the artifacts via interviews of ten gamification experts and implementation of the engineering method in a gamification project. Results As results of the study, we present the method and key design principles for engineering gamified software. Based on the empirical and expert evaluation, the developed method was deemed as comprehensive, implementable, complete, and useful. We deliver a comprehensive overview of gamification guidelines and shed novel insights into the nature of gamification development and design discourse. Conclusion This paper takes first steps towards a comprehensive method for gamified software engineering.

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How to design gamification? A method for engineering gamified software

Learner’s motivation difficulties are recognized as a problem in diverse educational scenarios, reaching up to university degrees Among other techniques that are often applied by instructors to counteract this issue, those related to the use of gaming elements seem to very promising In this context, considering the use of game-like properties in learning scenarios, known as gamification, has received increasing interest by academia in recent years However, its application in higher education can be challenging, due to some unwanted effects caused by the lack of proven design methodologies have been detected Choosing the adequate formal process for gamification design has become an important success requirement This work presents a systematic review of the gamification design frameworks discussed in the literature, providing a useful resource to educational practitioners as well as gamification designers and researchers A total of 2314 unique works are initially recorded, based on queries in databases, libraries, journals and search engines After applying a systematic filtering process, a definitive list of 40 works is more closely analysed Next to review over relevant literature, an assessment of the main features found in the discussed approaches is given, while also categorizing them according to their main application field and its suitability in higher educational environments

Gamification: a systematic review of design frameworks

Context-sensitive systems (CSS) are computer systems that use context to provide more relevant services or information to support users performing their tasks, where context is any information that can be used to characterize the situation in which something exists or occurs. CSS demand that designers consider new aspects and challenges in comparison to traditional applications. In a preliminary experiment, we observed that developers find it difficult to include the concept of context in their applications. However, only few approaches offer integrated domain-independent support on developing CSS. This paper presents an integrated approach to assist the design of CSS. The originality of this work lies on the proposed way of thinking about context, on the proposed context metamodel and on the specification of a process for designing CSS. The metamodel supports building context models by making explicit the concepts related to context manipulation and by separating the context structure model from the CSS behavior model. The design process details the main activities related to context specification and the design of CSS, providing a systematic way to execute these tasks. This work also advances the state of the art related to the understanding of the concept of context (and its associated concepts). Three experimental studies were conducted to evaluate the proposal: its instantiation in the design of a context-sensitive Expert Recommender System, its usage by distinct designers on their CSS projects, and a qualitative evaluation of the overall proposal by experienced CSS developers. These studies showed a good acceptance of our approach and indicated the feasibility of using it on real projects.

Designing context-sensitive systems: An integrated approach

Crowd sourcing systems call a crowd of users to collaborate on solving real-life problems. One key issue for the success of such systems is to guarantee users' participation. A strategy that has been used to promote user participation is the use of game design techniques, since games have successful strategies to grant enjoyable user experience. However, most gamification methods and guidelines are too generic, do not emphasize the collaboration aspects and focus on introducing rewarding elements into the application, instead of designing player-centric applications. Reward-based design is dangerous, specially for collaborative systems, because it may put points gathering as the primary purpose of the application instead of the collaboration goal. This paper presents G.A.M.E., a conceptual framework to guide the design of gamification in crowd sourcing-based systems. The framework provides a flexible step-by-step guideline that combines knowledge from software engineering, collaborative systems, game design and interaction design. To evaluate our proposal, we instantiated G.A.M.E. Into two applications in the domain of public transportation. The influence of gamification in those applications were evaluated through controlled navigation tests in a crowd sourcing usability testing platform. Our findings showed us that gamification improved user interfaces of collaboration activities by 16% on usability and were more trustworthy in 80% the cases.

Towards a Framework for Gamification Design on Crowdsourcing Systems: The G.A.M.E. Approach

An important issue in groupware is how to improve interaction and collaboration among participants. Through the analysis of the context a user is in or the context that surrounds an interaction, groupware systems can provide users with useful information in that situation. A relevant issue when using context is how to represent context information. Ontologies constitute an interesting method for representing context, since they enable information sharing and reuse. They can also be used by existing inference machines to reason about various contexts. In this paper we propose an ontology to formally represent context in groupware systems. We also present an example where this ontology is used by a logic-based reasoning mechanism for tool recommendation based on the current context of group members. We believe that this ontology could help to understand the role of context in collaboration and thus make the development of context-aware groupware systems easier.

Towards an ontology for context representation in groupware

In times where users need to process an ever increasing amount of information to perform more complex tasks in less time, the introduction of context in computer systems is becoming a necessity. However, building a context-sensitive system entails more work in comparison to traditional systems development: in the former, one must care for context-related tasks, such as the acquisition, processing, storage, manipulation and presentation of contextual elements. Context management proposes the separation of context related tasks from the application's business features. This paper presents a study on context management and discusses our proposal for a context manager, called CEManTIKA (Contextual Elements Management Through Incremental Knowledge Acquisition). A scenario is presented to illustrate its applicability.

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Investigating the specifics of contextual elements management: the CEManTIKA approach

We report a mapping study to analyze visualization tools in emergency management.Map the area (scientific community and the contributions published in the literature).We point common visualization techniques, environments and phases.Existent literature provides only partial solutions.Findings can support on proposing new approaches to solve open problems in the area. Background: Emergency management (EM) refers to the ability to deal with emergency tasks in different phases and iterations. To do this, each task requires many and different types of information coming from several sources related to the incident. As people working in an emergency situation are generally under stress and have to make quick and effective decisions, they need to assimilate the received information in an easy and intuitive way. Information visualization (InfoVis) is the study of visual representations of abstract data to reinforce human cognition to understand these data through 2D computer screens. It is frequently used to analyze and understand the huge amount of multidimensional data produced in an emergency.Objective: This study analyzes how researchers use information visualization tools to improve emergency management. Our general objective is to map the area examining both the scientific community and the contributions that have been published in the literature, aiming to provide information, such as: understanding how the area is structured, common practices in existing works, and research gaps.Methods: A systematic mapping study was conducted to analyze the available information visualization tools and their applications in EM activities. A thorough search was carried out and a formal selection process was applied to gather all relevant articles on the subject. Selected primary studies were classified and analyzed with respect to their metadata and to answer eight research questions related to our mapping goal. In total, 196 studies were analyzed in depth.Results: The mapping study identified the most common visualization techniques applied in emergency management, the common environments and phases where they are applied, identifying gaps and also possible trends in the subject. We found out that particular issues concerning emergency management are not fully covered by existing visualization approaches, and when covered, existing literature provides only partial solutions.Conclusion: Our results provide a deep analysis on the application of InfoVis in the EM area, supporting researchers and developers in EM systems with insightful information on trending techniques in use, command practices and existing research gaps. We expect that these findings can support them on proposing new approaches to solve open problems in the area.

Vaninha Vieira

Papers

Designing context-sensitive systems: An integrated approach

Towards a Framework for Gamification Design on Crowdsourcing Systems: The G.A.M.E. Approach

Towards an ontology for context representation in groupware

Investigating the specifics of contextual elements management: the CEManTIKA approach

Information visualization for emergency management