Evaluation of Task Based Digital Work Environment

A task-based Digital Work Environment (DWE) has been designed and developed at Nanyang Technological University, Singapore to support the Division of Information Studies (DIS) Masters students’ information requirements for their dissertation work. This paper traces the evaluation studies of DWE to gauge the usefulness and effectiveness of its three different approaches to information organisation namely, alphabetical, subject category and task-based. The findings show that the task-based approach is most effective in terms of speed of accessing information resources. 1. DWE Design and Development A task-based DWE is designed and developed [1] to provide a one-stop information access point for both internal and external information resources that are accessed by the academic community. A job analysis was first carried out to identify all the main tasks and sub-tasks associated with dissertation as a representative task to create a task hierarchy and information resources required for the dissertation task through a focus group study [http://InformationR.net/ir/7-2/paper125.html]. The DWE uses a task-based approach to organise the information resources for access according to different user categories (e.g. faculty, student). This was augmented with three additional information resources organisation approaches, namely, the alphabetical resource approach (AR), the subject category approach (SC) and a hybrid approach (HY) combining all these three different approaches.