Exploring the potential of unobtrusive proactive task support

This research concerns how to make task-related online resources accessible to users in a convenient manner in the context of work. It explores the potential of proactive but relatively unobtrusive task support: based on task progress, advice is displayed in separate and persistently present advice windows side-by-side to the Task Window, and the display is updated intermittently. The proposed approach is illustrated with a prototype, Telephone Triage Assistant (TTA), for supporting junior nurses' triage task. The usefulness and usability of TTA were assessed based on the results of an exploratory study at a medical call centre. Results show that subjects seemed to have spent a significant portion of the task time on TTA, and felt mostly positive about TTA. There was also a great deal of overlap between subjects' line of questioning and advice from TTA.