FIT on the Top of an Organizer - A New Technique for Multi-Purpose Event Recording

Abstract

One of the most cost consuming tasks in systems analysis is the recording of data. Concerning to work process analysis, the objectives hereby are to observe, identify and register events, for example: tasks, postures, movements, gestures, episodes of communication or co-operation as well as environmental factors. To economise this, handheld computer tools in the size of an electronic organiser can be use for onsite and online observations. For their application the user has to learn by heart the meaning of function keys, menu abbreviations or codes and has to spent an high amount of training time to reach an acceptable flexibility in programming or configuration the whole system for different observation tasks. To improve this, a new concept has to: - reduce the gap between the event recorder interface and the observer’s mental model, - provide online flexibility without reprogramming, - guarantee the ease of adaptability for different applications. The FIT-System (Flexible Interface Technique) can fulfil these demands and is presented in this paper.