Interruption Practice Reduces Procedural Errors at the Post-Completion Step

Abstract

Mitigating the effects of interruptions is important for tackling the increasing number of possible disruptions at home, at work, and online. Previous work has shown that the benefits of practice can decrease the amount of time it takes to resume a task after an interruption. This paper demonstrates that the same benefit can be extended to error rates at the post-completion step in a simulated computerized physician order entry (CPOE) system. This example of a real-world procedural task demonstrates that a general increase in interruptions leads to changes in performance for the final step of the task.

Effect of Redundant Haptic Information on Task Performance during Visuo-Tactile Task Interruption and Recovery

“…In addition, interruptions lead to an increase in the likelihood of errors within the recovered task (Trafton et al, 2011; Brumby et al, 2013). These two prominent influences are common within different kinds of tasks, such as simple data-entry tasks (Zish and Trafton, 2014), sequential tasks (Trafton et al, 2011), cognitively demanding tasks (Borst et al, 2015), and decision-making tasks (Gathmann et al, 2015). Research in the field of human-computer interaction has also examined task switching and cognitive control in order to predict human task performance (Hornof et al, 2010).…”