Stefan Morana

A review of the nature and effects of guidance design features

Guidance design features in information systems are used to help people in decision-making, problem solving, and task execution. Various information systems instantiate guidance design features, which have specifically been researched in the field of decision support systems for decades. However, due to the lack of a common conceptualization, it is difficult to compare the research findings on guidance design features from different literature streams. This article reviews and analyzes the work of the research streams of decisional guidance, explanations, and decision aids conducted in the last 25years. Building on and grounded by the analyzed literature, we theorize an integrated taxonomy on guidance design features. Applying the taxonomy, we discuss existing empirical results, identify effects of different guidance design features, and propose opportunities for future research. Overall, this article contributes to research and practice. The taxonomy allows researchers to describe their work by using a set of dimensions and characteristics and to systematically compare existing research on guidance design features. From a practice-oriented perspective, we provide an overview on design features to support implementing guidance in various types of information systems. Encompassing overview on guidance design features from 25years of researchIntegrated taxonomy on guidance design features based on three literature streamsOverview on effects and outcomes of guidance design features

Projekterfahrungen spielend einfach mit der ProjectWorld! - Ein gamifiziertes Projektwissensmanagementsystem

ZusammenfassungWissensmanagement ist eine komplexe Aufgabe, welche oftmals von existierenden Wissensmanagementsystemen nur unzureichend unterstützt wird. Insbesondere in Projekten, in welchen Projektmitarbeiter meist einen heterogenen Hintergrund haben und nur für eine begrenzte Zeit zusammenarbeiten, ist das Wissensmanagement eine große Herausforderung. Projektwissen wird nur selten dokumentiert und noch seltener wiederverwendet, da die Projektmitglieder keine Zeit und wenig Motivation für dessen Dokumentation haben. Als Konsequenz daraus werden oftmals bereits bekannte Lösungen gefunden und Projektteams machen die gleichen Fehler wie ihre Vorgänger. Gamification stellt eine Lösung für dieses Problem dar, da es darauf abzielt, die aktive Teilnahme in Anwendungssystemen zu motivieren. Der vorliegende Beitrag beschreibt die Gestaltung und Umsetzung eines gamifizierten Projektwissensmanagementsystems, genannt ProjectWorld, in einem Unternehmen. Die ProjectWorld zielt darauf ab, Mitarbeiter zu motivieren, sich dauerhaft am Wissensmanagement zu beteiligen und ihr Wissen mit anderen Mitarbeitern zu teilen. Obwohl noch keine konkreten, empirisch fundierten Ergebnisse bezüglich langfristiger Effekte auf die Wissensdokumentation und –wiederverwendung vorliegen, kann man, basierend auf qualitative Aussagen der potentiellen Nutzer, positive Auswirkungen auf das Projektwissensmanagement im Unternehmen annehmen.AbstractKnowledge management is a complex endeavor which is often insufficiently supported by existing knowledge management systems. In particular, projects suffer from challenges of project knowledge management, since its team members are highly heterogeneous with regard to their background and work together for only a limited duration. Thus, project knowledge is rarely documented and even more rarely reused due to a lack of time and low motivation of team members. As a consequence, project teams are finding already known solutions or make the same mistakes like previous projects. Gamification is a new trend which promises to solve these issues, since it aims to motivate system users to engage in application systems. This article describes the design and realization of a gamified project knowledge management system named ProjectWorld in a company. ProjectWorld aims to motivate employees to engage in knowledge management and to share their knowledge within the organization. Although, at an early stage with no empirical results regarding the effects of the gamified system on knowledge documentation and reuse, it can be assumed—based on qualitative statements of potential users—that ProjectWorld will have positive impacts on the project knowledge management of the company.

Projektwissen spielend einfach managen mit der ProjectWorld

Die Autoren zeigen einen neuen Weg auf, gamifizierte Wissensmanagementsysteme mit der Anwendung spielerischer Elemente zu gestalten, und beschreiben die Anforderungserhebung, die Gestaltung und Evaluation des Systems. Hierbei gehen sie auf die theoretischen Grundlagen sowie die Umsetzung und Nutzung in einem Unternehmen ein. Mithilfe von Gamification-Mechanismen sollen Projektteams dazu motiviert werden, ihr Wissen und ihre Erfahrungen zu dokumentieren und in anderen Projekten wiederzuverwenden. Damit erhalt der Leser einen umfassenden Einblick in die Theorie und Praxis des modernen Wissensmanagements in Projekten.

User guidance for document-driven processes in enterprise systems

In practice up to 80% of the overall processed data is only available in an unstructured form, such as documents. The handling of documents within organizations is still an issue in both, research and practice. Employees perceive the way to handle business-relevant documents as high effort and struggle with handling documents compliant to organizational standards. As a result documents become decoupled from the defined business processes and scattered all over the organizations IT landscape. Understanding users and their needs in order to increase their intention to use Enterprise Systems consistent to organization-wide business processes is a gap in the existing literature. This paper presents a design science research project focusing on user guidance for document-driven processes in Enterprise Systems. Building on existing research in user guidance, we suggest to increase the users individual awareness towards processing documents consistent to organizational processes. In addition to our research design, we present a preliminary artifact version based on the results of an exploratory interview study.

Designing Conversational Agents for Energy Feedback

Reducing and shifting energy consumption could contribute significantly to a more sustainable use of energy in households. Studies have shown that the provision of feedback can encourage consumers to use energy more sustainably. While there is wide variety of energy feedback solutions ranging from in-home displays to mobile applications, there is a lack of research on whether and how conversational agents can provide energy feedback to promote sustainable energy use. As conversational agents, such as chatbots, promise a natural and intuitive user interface, they may have great potential for energy feedback. This paper explores how to design conversational agents for energy feedback and proposes design principles based on existing literature. The design principles are instantiated in a text-based conversational agent and evaluated in a focus group session with industry experts. We contribute with valuable design knowledge that extends previous research on the design of energy feedback solutions.

On the Role of Users’ Cognitive-Affective States for User Assistance Invocation

User assistance systems are often invoked automatically based on simple triggers (e.g., the assistant pops up after the user has been idle for some time) or they require users to invoke them manually. Both invocation modes have their weaknesses. Therefore, we argue that, ideally, the assistance should be invoked intelligently based on the users’ actual need for assistance. In this paper, we propose a research project investigating the role of users’ cognitive-affective states when providing assistance using NeuroIS measurements. Drawing on the theoretical foundations of the Attentional Control Theory, we propose an experiment that helps to understand how cognitive-affective states can serve as indicators for the best point of time for the invocation of user assistance systems. The research described in this paper will ultimately help to design intelligent invocation of user assistance systems.

Towards Designing an Assistant for Semi-Automatic EMS Dispatching

Many Emergency Medical Service (EMS) systems worldwide handle emergency rescues as well as patient transports and dispatchers need to assign ambulances to incidents manually throughout the day. The management of the complex system together with the manual assignments can easily create stress for and pressure on the dispatchers. Mathematical algorithms can help improving the dispatching quality, but then dispatchers still need to choose the best-fitting algorithm and furthermore, trust the algorithm’s dispatching suggestion. We propose an assistant that can support the EMS dispatchers. The assistant offers explanations for the choice of the algorithm as well as the dispatching suggestion in order to increase the dispatchers’ trust and decrease their stress. We ground the assistant’s design in Information Systems as well as Operations Research literature and thus, show how interdisciplinary service research can contribute in designing artefacts for complex service systems to solve real-world problems.

Designing Attention-aware Business Intelligence and Analytics Dashboards

The design of user interface is known to influence the users’ attention while they are interacting with applications such as Business Intelligence and Analytics (BI&A) dashboards. BI&A dashboards are considered as critical be-cause they contain a lot of compressed information and managers only spend a little time to process the provided information. Thereby, they need to man-age their visual attention properly due to inattentional blindness and change blindness issues. We propose to investigate the design of BI&A dashboards that are sensitive to the users’ attention. So called attention-aware BI&A dashboards are of utmost importance in the field of BI&A systems since attention is known to play a major role in constructing decisions. We motivate our research project and present the initial design of attention-aware BI&A dashboards. Especially the inclusion of eye-tracking technology is an important aspect of our proposed design.This paper reports on the results of a study to investigate how scholars engage with and use the action design research (ADR) approach. ADR has been acknowledged as an important variant of the Desi ...

Gamification zur Motivation von Technologienutzern

„Das ganze Leben ist ein Spiel“ – heute mehr denn je. Wo man hinschaut, kann man Punkte sammeln, sich mit anderen messen und vergleichen oder Abzeichen und Boni gewinnen. Beim Einkaufen kann man „Treuepunkte“ sammeln, fur welche man als Gegenleistung Vergunstigungen oder Produkte erhalt.

Die ProjectWorld in der Movilitas

Nach ihrer Fertigstellung wurde die ProjectWorld in einem Soft-Launch-Verfahren bei der Movilitas eingefuhrt. Zu Beginn erhielt eine kleine, ausgewahlte Gruppe von Mitarbeitern einen Zugang zur ProjectWorld, um diese vor der Einfuhrung in einer kompletten Abteilung zu testen. Die Gruppe bestand aus einem Geschaftsfuhrer, einem Projektmanager sowie zwei weiteren Mitarbeitern des Unternehmens.