Abstract
Web Design has been evolving with Web-based systems becoming more complex and structured due to the delivery of personalised information adapted to end-users. Although information presented can be useful and well formatted, people have little mental workload available for dealing with unusable systems. Subjective mental workload assessments tools are usually adopted to measure the impact of Web-tasks upon end-users thanks to their ease of use and are aimed at supporting design practices. The Nasa Task Load Index subjective procedure has been taken as a reference technique for measuring mental workload, but it has a background in aircraft cockpits, supervisory and process control environments. We argue that the tool is not fully appropriate for dealing with Web-information tasks, characterised by a wide spectrum of contexts of use, cognitive factors and individual user differences such as skill, background, emotional state and motivation. Furthermore, in this model, inputs are averaged without considering their mutual interactions and relations. We propose to see human mental workload as non-monotonic concept and to model it via argumentation theory. The evaluation strategy includes coparisons with the NASA-TLX in terms of statistical correlation, sensitivity, diagnosticity, selectivity and reliability.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Redish, J.: Expanding usability testing to evaluate complex systems. Journal of Usability Studies 2(3), 102–111 (2007)
Nielsen, J.: Designing Web Usability: The Practice of Simplicity. New Riders Publishing, Indianapolis (1999)
Kantowitz, B.: Development of nasa-tlx (task load index): Results of empirical and theoretical research. Human Mental Workload 51, 139–183 (1988)
Hancock, P.A., Meshkati, N.: Human Mental Workload. North Holland Ed. (1988)
Wickens, D., McCarley, J.: Applied Attention Theory. CRC (2008)
Cain, B.: A review of the mental workload literature. Report (2007)
Gopher, D., Donchin, E.: Workload: An examination of the concept. Handbook of Perception and Human Performance 2(41), 1–49 (1986)
Baroni, P., Guida, G., Mussi, S.: Full non-monotonicity: a new perspective in defeasible reasoning. In: European Symp. on Intelligent Techniques, pp. 58–62 (1997)
Toni, F.: Argumentative agents. In: Proc. of Multiconference on Computer Science and Information Technology, pp. 223–229 (2010)
Dung, P.M.: On the acceptability of arguments and its fundamental role in nonmonotonic reasoning, logic programming and n-person games. Artificial Intelligence 77, 321–357 (1995)
Brewka, G., Niemel, I., Truszczynski, M.: Non-monotonic reasoning. In: Handbook of Knowledge Representation, pp. 239–284 (2007)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Longo, L. (2012). Formalising Human Mental Workload as Non-monotonic Concept for Adaptive and Personalised Web-Design. In: Masthoff, J., Mobasher, B., Desmarais, M.C., Nkambou, R. (eds) User Modeling, Adaptation, and Personalization. UMAP 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7379. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31454-4_38
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-31454-4_38
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-31453-7
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-31454-4
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)