The effects of task complexity and time availability limitations on human performance in database query tasks

Topi, Heikki; Valacich, Joseph S.; Hoffer, Jeffrey A.

doi:10.1016/j.ijhcs.2004.10.003

Cited by 74 publications

(61 citation statements)

References 40 publications

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“…Another way to manipulate task difficulty is to simply increase the available information or complexity of a single task. Increased task difficulty in this domain leads to decreased performance on a variety of detection tasks (Bailey & Scerbo, 2007;Bodenhausen & Lichtenstein, 1987;Molloy & Parasuraman, 1996;Rutte & Messick, 1996;Thackray & Touchstone, 1989), discrimination tasks (Sidowski, Morgan, & Eckstrand, 1958), organizational tasks (Earley, 1985;Kernan, Bruning, & Miller-Guhde, 1994;Maynard & Hakel, 1997), maze completion tasks (Griffith, Fichman, & Moreland, 1989), database query tasks (Topi, Valacich, & Hoffer, 2005), and visual tasks.…”

Section: Task Difficultymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Harder the Task, the More Inconsistent the Performance: A PPT Analysis on Task Difficulty

Rice

Geels

Hackett

et al. 2012

The Journal of General Psychology

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Previous research has demonstrated that as task difficulty increases, task performance subsequently decreases. These decrements in task performance as difficulty increases have been attributed to the processes individuals use to complete tasks. Over a series of three experiments, Potential Performance Theory (PPT; Trafimow & Rice, 2008 ; 2009), was used to test the hypothesis that decreases in task performance are, in part, due to inconsistency rather than only systematic factors. Task difficulty was manipulated in three visual search tasks by increasing set size (Experiment 1), decreasing contrast (Experiment 2), and increasing background distracters (Experiment 3). Findings over the three studies indicated that decreases in observed task performance as task difficulty increases are primarily due to a decrease of consistency rather than systematic factors. The theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.

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Section: Task Difficultymentioning

confidence: 99%

The Harder the Task, the More Inconsistent the Performance: A PPT Analysis on Task Difficulty

Rice

Geels

Hackett

et al. 2012

The Journal of General Psychology

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“…To study this, we root ourselves to the theory on task complexity (e.g., Liu and Li 2012), which has been applied to, for example, individual consumption decision process (Tversky and Kahneman 1981), auditing process (Mascha 2001), programming assignments (Topi et al 2005) and knowledge acquisition (Mascha 2001;Lankton et al 2012). Despite this range of applications, task-complexity has not been tested to sourcing-decisions in general, as well as to the specific problem considered in this paper.…”

Section: Human Experiments On Decision Qualitymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, our third stream is the taskcomplexity literature. Task-complexity theory has been applied to different process such as individual consumption (Tversky and Kahneman 1981), auditing process (Mascha 2001), programming assignments (Topi et al 2005) and knowledge acquisition (Mascha 2001;Lankton et al 2012). There is, however, no empirical examination of the effect of task complexity on sourcing-decisions in general and specifically to the STaaS issue considered herein (Karunakaran et al 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Organizational implications of a comprehensive approach for cloud-storage sourcing

Krishnaswamy

Sundarraj

2015

Inf Syst Front

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Cloud-computing facilitates consumers to source online storage-services on a pay-as-you-go basis. The sourcing of storage-as-a-service (STaaS) requires a decision maker to contend with several elements such as pricing structure, application characteristics and quality-of-service requirements, in addition to tactical considerations such as risk propensity and supplier diversification. This makes STaaS sourcing a complex task. Discussion on STaaS sourcing models addressing these aspects and their utility to decision-makers is, however, scant. In this paper, we propose a two-stage holistic approach based on Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) and Goal programming (GP). We derive insights provided by these models from 10800 runs using market-based data. We also use an experiment to assess our hypothesis concerning the impact of task complexity on decision-quality. Both these experiments have implications for different business scenarios in the STaaS market, and for decision-making. We discuss these managerial implications, and present a prototype Decision Support System (DSS) to aid STaaS selection.

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“…Although research focused on the usability of search interfaces has found significant effects of task complexity on users' performance during query formulation (Chan, et al, 1997;Topi, et al, 2005), there are no studies that have investigated the effects of task complexity on users' performance and satisfaction with metadata surrogates during the relevance judgment process. Component complexity, which is based on the number of different information cues that need to be processed by a user to complete the task, has direct implications for the evaluation of metadata surrogates.…”

Section: Effects Of Task Complexitymentioning

confidence: 99%

Design factors affecting relevance judgment behaviour in the context of metadata surrogates

Balatsoukas

O’Brien

Morris

2010

Journal of Information Science

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For the full text of this licence, please go to: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/2.5/ Design factors affecting user interaction and relevance judgment behaviour with metadata surrogates: the case of structure, highlighting and quantity of information AbstractThis paper reports on the findings of a user study which investigated the effects of structure, highlighting and quantity of information on university students' interaction with metadata surrogates of learning object repositories (LORs) during the relevance judgment process. The literature review revealed a lack of studies investigating how metadata surrogates should be designed to meet users' needs and improve the effectiveness of relevance judgment. In order to address this issue, different versions of a prototype system, called META-LOR 2, were developed and evaluated in terms of the time needed for users to find relevant information, the accuracy of their relevance judgments and their satisfaction. To evaluate the prototype, a user study was conducted where test subjects were asked to complete a set of tasks and fill in a satisfaction questionnaire. The findings showed that participants performed better and were more satisfied with those versions of the prototype which highlighted metadata elements that included the query terms, used clusters or categories to organize metadata elements in the surrogates and included metadata elements which were relevant to the query or task at hand. Participants performed less efficiently and were less satisfied with metadata surrogates which lacked the use of a clear structure, did not highlight the query terms and contained a large number of metadata elements. It is anticipated that the findings of this research will enhance understanding of users' interaction with metadata surrogates during the relevance judgment process and improve the design of the search result interfaces of educational information retrieval systems, such as LORs.

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The effects of task complexity and time availability limitations on human performance in database query tasks

Cited by 74 publications

References 40 publications

The Harder the Task, the More Inconsistent the Performance: A PPT Analysis on Task Difficulty

The Harder the Task, the More Inconsistent the Performance: A PPT Analysis on Task Difficulty

Organizational implications of a comprehensive approach for cloud-storage sourcing

Design factors affecting relevance judgment behaviour in the context of metadata surrogates

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