WaitSuite: Productive Use of Diverse Waiting Moments
Author(s)
Cai, Carrie Jun; Miller, Robert C; Ren, Anji
Downloadtochi16-waitsuite.pdf (4.193Mb)
OPEN_ACCESS_POLICY
Open Access Policy
Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike
Terms of use
Metadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The busyness of daily life makes it difficult to find time for informal learning. Yet, learning requires significant time and effort, with repeated exposures to educational content on a recurring basis. Despite the struggle to find time, there are numerous moments in a day that are typically wasted due to waiting, such as while waiting for the elevator to arrive, wifi to connect, or an instant message to arrive. We introduce the concept of wait-learning: automatically detecting wait time and inviting people to learn while waiting. Our approach is to design seamless interactions that augment existing wait time with productive opportunities. Combining wait time with productive work opens up a new class of software systems that overcome the problem of limited time.
In this article, we establish a design space for wait-learning and explore this design space by creating WaitSuite, a suite of five different wait-learning apps that each uses a different kind of waiting. For one of these apps, we conducted a feasibility study to evaluate learning and to understand how exercises should be timed during waiting periods. Subsequently, we evaluated multiple kinds of wait-learning in a two-week field study of WaitSuite with 25 people. We present design implications for wait-learning, and a theoretical framework that describes how wait time, ease of accessing the learning task, and competing demands impact the effectiveness of wait-learning in different waiting scenarios. These findings provide insight into how wait-learning can be designed to minimize interruption to ongoing tasks and maximize engagement with learning.
Date issued
2017-03Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence LaboratoryJournal
ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Citation
Cai, Carrie J. et al. “WaitSuite: Productive Use of Diverse Waiting Moments.” ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 24, 1 (March 2017): 1–41 © 2017 Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Version: Author's final manuscript
ISSN
1073-0516