The expressiveness of the GOMS language for describing “how-to” knowledge determines what kinds of human activities can be captured by a GOMS task analysis. This paper addresses the adequacy of this framework for representing human behavior in realistically time-pressured, uncertain, and otherwise demanding task environments. Several improvements have been incorporated into a GOMS-like formalis...

We describe a simple and powerful tool for the management of distributed work: the Task Manager. Common tasks may be shared and manipulated independently by a number of people. They are represented as shared to-do lists at the user interface. With the help of the tool, users may organize cooperative tasks, monitor their progress, share documents and services, and exchange messages during task p...

Developing innovative mobile approaches to informal and formal learning raises a challenge to satisfy various stakeholders. Evaluations may focus on examining the nature and quality of learning that occurs when using technological systems, other methods are targeted towards user interactions with the systems. In this paper we highlight a methodology that attempts to address these two analytical...

Many theories about the process of design have been derived from prescriptive or descriptive analysis. There have been few attempts to empirically test these theories. Protocol analysis facilitates detailed inspection of the design process allowing design task analysis across the temporal dimension. Some hypotheses about the design process, derived from the literature, are objectively tested us...

Today, and especially in the future, soldiers have to be able to operate and maintain a large variety of devices connected to the cyber domain in whatever environment they are operating in. This places a high demand on soldiers’ cognitive abilities and mechanisms that humans use to process and store information. In this paper we study how motivation, gained by understanding the purpose of tasks...

We present a model of absolute autonomy and power in agent systems. This absolute sense of autonomy captures the agent’s liberty over an agent’s preferences. Our model characterizes an affinity between autonomy and power. We argue that agents with similar individual autonomy and power experience an adjusted level of autonomy and power due to being in a group of like agents. We then illustrate o...

We sharply characterize the performance of different penalization schemes for the problem of selecting the relevant variables in the multi-task setting. Previous work focuses on the regression problem where conditions on the design matrix complicate the analysis. A clearer and simpler picture emerges by studying the Normal means model. This model, often used in the field of statistics, is a sim...

UNLABELLED Cognitive work analysis (CWA) as an analytical approach for examining complex sociotechnical systems has shown success in modelling the work of single operators. The CWA approach incorporates social and team interactions, but a more explicit analysis of team aspects can reveal more information for systems design. In this paper, Team CWA is explored to understand teamwork within a bir...

An experimental study is presented, which investigates the process of building qualitative simulation models using HOMER, a tool for building qualitative models of systems. HOMER consists of a number of dedicated editors aiming at decomposing the complexity of the model building process into more manageable subtasks. The aims of the present study are a) validating the original task analysis und...