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Incorporating user control in automated interactive scheduling systems

Published: 16 August 2010 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we report our findings on the impact of providing users with varying degrees of control in an automated interactive scheduling system. While automated scheduling techniques such as constraint optimization have been widely adopted in a variety of scheduling applications, such applications require that users relinquish a certain amount of control to the system. The implications of such a shift in control are not clear for people who oversee the scheduling of human activities, for example, case managers scheduling patient appointments in hospitals and clinics. We asked our participants to use a working prototype system for clinic scheduling to complete a series of scheduling problems that we designed. We varied the size of the problems---i.e., the number of patients to be scheduled---and the style of interaction in ways that are associated with different degrees of user control. We recorded standard usability metrics and conducted post-task written surveys and interviews. Our results suggest that although maintaining full user control decreases efficiency as the problem becomes larger, the participants still preferred to have full user control in completing scheduling tasks. We end with design implications in supporting users' increased acceptance of automated scheduling systems.

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Cited By

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  • (2021)Using Boolean Satisfiability Solvers to Help Reduce Cognitive Load and Improve Decision Making when Creating Common Academic SchedulesProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445681(1-13)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
  • (2019)Keeping and Discarding Personal DataProceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3322276.3322300(1463-1477)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2019
  • (2019)Viewers’ Visions of the FutureProceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video10.1145/3317697.3323356(59-69)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2019
  • Show More Cited By

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  1. Incorporating user control in automated interactive scheduling systems

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    cover image ACM Other conferences
    DIS '10: Proceedings of the 8th ACM Conference on Designing Interactive Systems
    August 2010
    457 pages
    ISBN:9781450301039
    DOI:10.1145/1858171
    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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    New York, NY, United States

    Publication History

    Published: 16 August 2010

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    Author Tags

    1. automation
    2. group scheduling
    3. user control

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    Overall Acceptance Rate 1,158 of 4,684 submissions, 25%

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    View all
    • (2021)Using Boolean Satisfiability Solvers to Help Reduce Cognitive Load and Improve Decision Making when Creating Common Academic SchedulesProceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3411764.3445681(1-13)Online publication date: 6-May-2021
    • (2019)Keeping and Discarding Personal DataProceedings of the 2019 on Designing Interactive Systems Conference10.1145/3322276.3322300(1463-1477)Online publication date: 18-Jun-2019
    • (2019)Viewers’ Visions of the FutureProceedings of the 2019 ACM International Conference on Interactive Experiences for TV and Online Video10.1145/3317697.3323356(59-69)Online publication date: 4-Jun-2019
    • (2019)Towards Optimizing Hospital Patient Transports by Automatically Identifying Interpretable Causes of DelaysInternational Journal of Software Engineering and Knowledge Engineering10.1142/S021819401950028129:06(819-847)Online publication date: 25-Jun-2019

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