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O job can you return my mojo: improving human engagement and enjoyment in routine activities

Published: 10 April 2010 Publication History

Abstract

Unlike machines, we humans are prone to boredom when we perform routine activities for long periods of time. Workers' mental engagement in boring tasks diminishes, which eventually, compromises their performance. The result is a double-whammy because the workers do not get job satisfaction and their employers do not receive optimal return on investment. This paper proposes a novel way for improving workers' mental engagement and hence, enjoyment, in routine activities. Specifically, we propose to blend in routine tasks mild mental/physical challenges. To test our hypothesis, we chose to experiment on a monitoring task typical of security guard operations. We combined this routine task with an iPhone-based game to make it more enjoyable. The results from 10 participants show that their mental engagement and enjoyment were significantly higher during the combined task.

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  • (2021)Influence of levels of automation on the sense of agency during continuous actionScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-021-82036-311:1Online publication date: 28-Jan-2021
  • (2017)A Little Bit of Frustration Can Go a Long WayAdvances in Computer Games10.1007/978-3-319-71649-7_16(188-200)Online publication date: 22-Dec-2017
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cover image ACM Conferences
CHI '10: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
April 2010
2690 pages
ISBN:9781605589299
DOI:10.1145/1753326
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Published: 10 April 2010

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Author Tags

  1. computer games
  2. human engagement and performance
  3. human-computer interaction
  4. stress monitoring
  5. thermal imaging

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Cited By

View all
  • (2021)Fatigue, boredom and objectively measured smartphone use at workRoyal Society Open Science10.1098/rsos.2019158:7(201915)Online publication date: 7-Jul-2021
  • (2021)Influence of levels of automation on the sense of agency during continuous actionScientific Reports10.1038/s41598-021-82036-311:1Online publication date: 28-Jan-2021
  • (2017)A Little Bit of Frustration Can Go a Long WayAdvances in Computer Games10.1007/978-3-319-71649-7_16(188-200)Online publication date: 22-Dec-2017
  • (2013)TaskvilleCHI '13 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/2468356.2468384(151-156)Online publication date: 27-Apr-2013
  • (2011)The perception of sound and its influence in the classroomProceedings of the 13th IFIP TC 13 international conference on Human-computer interaction - Volume Part I10.5555/2042053.2042115(609-626)Online publication date: 5-Sep-2011
  • (2011)Who said monitoring is boringCHI '11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/1979742.1979849(2041-2046)Online publication date: 7-May-2011

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