Skip to main content

The Impact of Distraction in Natural Environments on User Experience Research

  • Conference paper

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 6966))

Abstract

Laboratories have long been seen as reasonable proxies for user experience research. Yet, this assumption may have become unreliable. The trend toward multiple activities in the users’ natural environment, where people simultaneously use a digital library, join a chat or read an incoming Facebook post, changes users’ behavior. The effects of these disruptions generate a gap that is generally not taken into account in user-experience research. This paper presents a psychological experiment that measured how differently people behave in a laboratory and in a natural environment setting. The existence and impact of distraction is measured in a standard laboratory setting and in a remote setting that explicitly allows users to work in their own natural environment. The data indicates that there are significant differences between results from the laboratory and natural environment setting. Distractions like email or chat influence the users’ performance and their ratings.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.

Buying options

Chapter
USD   29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD   39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD   54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Learn about institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Adamczyk, P.D., Bailey, B.P.: If not now, when? The effects of interruption at different moments within task execution. In: CHI 2004, pp. 271–278. ACM Press, New York (2004)

    Google Scholar 

  2. Andrzejczak, C., Liu, D.: The effect of testing location on usability testing performance, participant stress levels, and subjective testing experience. Journal of Systems and Software 83(7), 1258–1266 (2010)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Bruun, A., Gull, P., Hofmeister, L., Stage, J.: Let your users do the testing: A comparison of three remote asynchronous usability testing methods. In: CHI 2009, pp. 1619–1628. ACM, New York (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  4. Czerwinski, M., Cutrell, E., Horvitz, E.: Instant Messaging and Interruption: Influence of Task Type on Performance. In: Australasian Computer-Human Interaction Conference, pp. 356–361. Southern Cross University, Harbour (2000)

    Google Scholar 

  5. Kelly, D., Gyllstrom, K.: An Examination of Two Delivery Modes for Interactive Search System Experiments: Remote and Laboratory. In: CHI 2011, pp. 1531–1540. ACM, New York (2011)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Huang, S.C., Bias, R.G., Payne, T.L., Rogers, J.B.: Remote usability testing: a practice. In: Proceedings of the 2009 ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries, p. 397. Association for Computing Machinery, New York (2009)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  7. Rieh, S.Y.: On the Web at home: Information seeking and Web searching in the home environment. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 55(8), 743–753 (2004)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Roethlisberger, F.J., Dickson, W.J., Wright, H.A.: Management and the worker: An account of a research program conducted by the Western electric Company, Hawthorne Works, Chicago. Harvard Univ. Press, Cambridge (1975)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Tullis, T., Fleischman, S., McNult, M., Cianchette, C., Bergel, M.: An Empirical Comparison of Lab and Remote Usability Testing of Web Sites. In: Usability Professionals Association Conference (2007)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

About this paper

Cite this paper

Greifeneder, E. (2011). The Impact of Distraction in Natural Environments on User Experience Research. In: Gradmann, S., Borri, F., Meghini, C., Schuldt, H. (eds) Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries. TPDL 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 6966. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24469-8_32

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-24469-8_32

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-24468-1

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-24469-8

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics