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Daniel C. McFarlane

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Publication statistics

Pub. period:1994-2002
Pub. count:4
Number of co-authors:5

Co-authors

Number of publications with 3 favourite co-authors:

Robert J. K. Jacob:2
Linda E. Sibert:2
M. P. Mullen:1

Productive colleagues

Daniel C. McFarlane's 3 most productive colleagues in number of publications:

Robert J. K. Jacob:57
Linda E. Sibert:7
Kara A. Latorella:3

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May 27

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Daniel C. McFarlane

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Publications by Daniel C. McFarlane (bibliography)

2002

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McFarlane, Daniel C. and Latorella, Kara A. (2002): The Scope and Importance of Human Interruption in HCI Design. In Human-Computer Interaction, 17 (1) pp. 1-61.

“At first glance it seems absurd that busy people doing important jobs should want their computers to interrupt them. Interruptions are disruptive and people need to concentrate to make good decisions. However, successful job performance also frequently depends on people's abilities to (a) constantly monitor their dynamically changing information environments, (b) collaborate and communicate with other people in the system, and (c) supervise background autonomous services. These critical abilities can require people to simultaneously query a large set of information sources, continuously monitor for important events, and respond to and communicate with other human operators. Automated monitoring and alerting systems minimize the need to constantly monitor, but they induce alerts that may interrupt other activities. Such interrupting technologies are already widespread and include concurrent multitasking; mixed-initiative interaction; support for delegation and supervisory control of automation, including intelligent agents; and other distributed, background services and technologies that increase human-human communication.”

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McFarlane, Daniel C. (2002): Comparison of Four Primary Methods for Coordinating the Interruption of People in Human-Computer Interaction. In Human-Computer Interaction, 17 (1) pp. 63-139.

“Interruptions can cause people to make mistakes or errors during human-computer interaction (HCI). Interruptions occur as an unavoidable side-effect of some important kinds of human computer-based activities, for example, (a) constantly monitor for unscheduled changes in information environments, (b) supervise background autonomous services, and (c) intermittently collaborate and communicate with other people. Fortunately, people have powerful innate cognitive abilities that they can potentially leverage to manage multiple concurrent activities if they have specific kinds of control and interaction support. There is great opportunity, therefore, for user-interface design to increase people's ability to successfully handle interruptions, and prevent expensive errors. The literature contains very little concrete design wisdom about how to solve the interruption problems in user interfaces (UIs). Coordination support, however, is identified as a most important design topic. This article presents the results of an empirical investigation to compare basic design solutions for coordinating human interruption in computer-based multitasks. A theory-based taxonomy of human interruption is used to identify the four primary methods for coordinating human interruption. An experiment with 36 participants compares these four different design solutions within an abstracted common user multitasking context. The results show important design tradeoffs for coordinating the interruption of people in HCI and support some UI design guidelines. Negotiation support is the best overall solution except where small differences in the timeliness of handling interruptions is critical and then immediate is best.”

1994

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Jacob, Robert J. K., Sibert, Linda E., McFarlane, Daniel C. and Mullen Jr, M. Preston (1994): Integrality and Separability of Input Devices. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 1 (1) pp. 3-26.

“Current input device taxonomies and other frameworks typically emphasize the mechanical structure of input devices. We suggest that selecting an appropriate input device for an interactive task requires looking beyond the physical structure of devices to the deeper perceptual structure of the task, the device, and the interrelationship between the perceptual structure of the task and the control properties of the device. We affirm that perception is key to understanding performance of multidimensional input devices on multidimensional tasks. We have therefore extended the theory of processing of perceptual structure to graphical interactive tasks and to the control structure of input devices. This allows us to predict task and device combinations that lead to better performance and hypothesize that performance is improved when the perceptual structure of the task matches the control structure of the device. We conducted an experiment in which subjects performed two tasks with different perceptual structures, using two input devices with correspondingly different control structures, a three-dimensional tracker and a mouse. We analyzed both speed and accuracy, as well as the trajectories generated by subjects as they used the unconstrained three-dimensional tracker to perform each task. The results support our hypothesis and confirm the importance of matching the perceptual structure of the task and the control structure of the input device.”

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Jacob, Robert J. K., Sibert, Linda E., McFarlane, Daniel C. and Mullen, M. P. (1994): Integrality and Separability of Input Devices. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 1 (0) pp. 3-26.