MOBILE WAY OR THE HIGHWAY! THE ROLE OF DEPLOYMENT AND DESIGN IN PROBLEM SOLVING USING INFORMATION DASHBOARDS

Abstract

Information dashboards are becoming very popular in the areas of decision making and problem solving. Decision makers use heuristics when facing challenging environmental situations. These could result in systematic errors called biases. How do mobile information dashboards impact these biases? We propose that decision makers are more prone to biases associated with certain heuristics when using information dashboards deployed on mobile devices. Data visualizations on dashboards could be distorted. We also propose that employment of heuristics could increase the negative effect of distortions. There is a distinct bias in favor of deploying these dashboards on mobile versus static desktops. Is this justified by key performance and perceptual outcomes? Borrowing from the reference disciplines of cognitive psychology, instructional and educational psychology, vision search and advertising we arrive at a conceptual model that relates deployment, design and problem task type to performance and perceptual outcomes. The results of our controlled laboratory experiment indicate that use of dashboards with active control deployed on mobile devices will result in lesser task accuracy than the dashboards deployed on static desktops. Also users of highly interactive dashboards deployed on mobile devices experience lesser satisfaction than the users of the same dashboards on static desktops. Further research areas including the role of cognitive fit between problem representation and problem type were identified. These could potentially uncover situations when the mobile information dashboards outperform static desktop dashboards.