Reprocessability and Engagement: Comparing Text to Human Forms for Information Conveyance
(Room S320A)
28 Nov 17
5:00 PM
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5:30 PM
With the increasing pace of change, employee training is an important element in maintaining an organization’s competitiveness. One avenue to efficiently address this need is to use information and communication technologies (ICT) to support technology mediated learning (TML). The use of TML is cost effective relative to other approaches such as formal training by human instructors (Gupta & Bostrom, 2009). Developers of TMLs tend to design increasingly complex user interfaces before research can support the efficacy of these designs which motivates this study. This study provides a foundational step toward understanding the design of ICTs for conveyance of information.
This research draws upon Media Synchronicity Theory (MST) to examine the mode of information presentation in a task-performance context and evaluates how the mode of information presentation impacts user engagement, task performance, and satisfaction. We conducted an experiment with 147 participants, testing the relationship between four increasingly human modes of presentation (text, audio, embodied agent, and video). Our findings indicate that text increases engagement and that engagement mediates the relationship to task performance and task satisfaction. Specifically, this research found that in the context of information conveyance for task completion, text increased engagement resulting in increased task performance and satisfaction over other increasingly human modes of presentation. The findings indicate limitations on the use of embodied computer agents (Avatars) for conveying information for task completion due to the need for reprocessabilty of the information being conveyed.