How Time and Energy Affect Function
This is about how people use their time and energy for learning. We looked at how users learning in a digital space go about their daily lives and what affects how well they learn. Even though everyone has the same 24 hours in a day, how much time and energy they actually spend using or learning how to use a product or service will be different for each person.
Different situations affect how much time people have. For example, if someone spends a lot of time doing physical activities, they might prefer learning through audio or using audio-based features. Different people also have varying amounts of energy for their daily activities and have different routines. Where people are when they attempt to access your systems, and how people spend their time in your system can impact how well they can use your product and how satisfied they are. Factors like interruptions or how tired someone feels can affect how productive they are. For example, someone working long shifts in a hospital or taking care of a child might find it harder to focus when attempting to use a product.
We used a graph to show how physically and mentally demanding different activities are.
Jobs like caregiving or serving tables need both physical and mental effort (Q1), while desk jobs that involve thinking a lot need more mental than physical effort (Q2). Free time is in Q3, and activities like exercising or driving are physically demanding but don’t need as much mental effort (Q4). Mapping how people spend their time and energy visually can help us understand their habits and preferences for learning.
Research
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Josipa Roksa and Peter Kinsley. The role of family support in facilitating academic success of low-income students.Research in Higher Education, 60:415–436, 2019.
Winnie Dunn, Catana Brown, and Ann McGuigan. The ecology of human performance: A framework for considering the effect of context. The American Journal of Occupational Therapy, 48(7):595–607, 1994.
Sarah A Powers and Mark W Scerbo. Examining the effect of interruptions at different breakpoints and frequencies within a task. Human Factors, 65(1):22–36, 2023.
Sébastien Tremblay, François Vachon, Daniel Lafond, and Chelsea Kramer. Dealing with task interruptions in complex dynamic environments: are two heads better than one? Human factors, 54(1):70–83, 2012.