DECISIONAL GUIDANCE - Human-Computer Interaction and Management Information Systems: Foundations - page 82

Table 6.4

Studies of Decisional Guidance: Tasks and Guidance Provided

Study Task

Parikh, Fazlollahi, and Verma (2001) Choosing a forecasting method for time series analysis

Parikh and Fazlollahi (2002)

Wilson and Zigurs (1999) Answering questions about quantitative data

Mahoney, Roush, and Dandy (2003)
Montazemi, Wang, Nainar, and Bart (1996) Problem formulation (for judgmental tasks)

Huguenard and Ballou (2001) Job scheduling—assigning mail to sorting machines

Wang and Benbasat (2004) Answering questions asked by a rule-based

e-commerce recommendation agent

Antony, Batra, and Santhanam (2005) Conceptual data modeling

Jiang and Klein (2000) Choosing a forecasting method (as a multi-attribute task)

Limayem and DeSanctis (1993, 2000) Group decision making (for a multi-criteria

decision-making task)

Vessey, Jarvenpaa, and Tractinsky (1993) CASE tools

Jankowski (1997)
Scott, Horvath, and Day (2000)
Wheeler and Valacich (1996) Group decision making

Rai, Stubbart, and Paper (1994) Executive information systems

course of action to the user. It provides two pieces of information that together imply that least
squares should be used, but stops short of making a recommendation, leaving the user to draw that
conclusion from the information. The system thus provides rich informative guidance but no
suggestions. Nonetheless, although this guidance does not meet the precise standard for sugges-
tive guidance, it is clearly in that spirit. The guidance was intended at least to nudge the user
in the direction of least squares, and many users would likely be nudged. So this guidance
mechanism—which was found to be beneficial to users—seems to sit between informative and
suggestive guidance.
This lack of fit motivates contemplating the following hypothetical system. Suppose a differ-
ent forecasting system provides guidance consisting of two elements: a statement about the
dataset (for instance, that it has a linear trend) and a menu with highlights on those methods con-
sistent with the statement. Here, too, the current typology would require classifying the mecha-
nism as informative guidance, but it clearly has a suggestive or directive element.