Behaviors and Expectations: Exploring Mobile Work Style for Domain Expert Users

Abstract For the past few decades, mobility has increasingly come to focus both in the industry and academia. Advances in software, networking, and cloud computing have empowered people to work from anywhere at anytime with anyone. This paper presents previous case studies on the behaviors and expectations of mobile work styles for two types of domain expert users – doctors and IT administrators (admins). We also raise research questions and identify design implications in terms of mobile work styles for these types of users from an HCI perspective.

Author Keywords Collaboration; Mobility; Remote Work; Security

ACM Classification Keywords H.5.m. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI): Miscellaneous.

Introduction Mobility is becoming increasingly popular as an industry work style and as a research topic. Many companies provide software technology and services leveraging today’s advanced Internet services [4] to enable people to work from anywhere, anytime, on any device. [3] As we enjoy the services and software that offer us the flexibility and capability of working from anywhere, the

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Ashley Pan Citrix Systems, Inc. 4980 Great America Pkwy Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA ashley.pan@citrix.com Smitha Papolu Citrix System, Inc. 4980 Great America Pkwy Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA smitha.papolu@citrix.com

challenges that we are facing in delivering seamless experiences and services to people are also growing. More specifically, research on mobility and mobile collaboration [1] indicates that there is a need to understand this area more broadly as well as deeply.

Our research is motivated by three questions: 1. What is the “mobile work style” for domain-expert

users such as doctors and IT admins?

2. What are their current experiences and expectations towards mobile work technologies?

3. What can we, as HCI practitioners and researchers, do to help people fulfill their goals and achieve a better mobile work experience?

The contribution of this workshop paper falls into the following areas:

• Provide two case studies for understanding mobile work styles of doctors and IT admins.

• Develop some research questions, design considerations, and implications for our field, especially the industry community to provide a seamless mobile work experience.

What Does “Mobile Work Style” Mean to HCI? In this workshop paper, by mobile work style, we mean: (1) The type of work that is outside of the typical workplace (e.g. office, classroom). Examples under this category also include remote workers working from home, on-the-go, or outside of regular office hours. (2) The type of work that relies on working from multiple places. Examples for this category include doctors who need to go to different places to visit patients on a daily basis or sales people who travel and do their businesses with clients in various locations. In this work, we primarily focus on 2 types of domain

experts—doctors who actively move around and work in multiple locations (e.g. patient room, office, examination room, etc.), as well as IT admins who may need to work remotely and constantly need to use mobile tools for collaboration.

Behaviors and Expectations In this section, we will provide some use cases collected by Citrix on how doctors and IT admins engage in mobile work activities as well as their pain points, and expectations from mobile work spaces.

Doctors’ Mobile Work Experience In 2010, Citrix conducted a site visit to St. Luke’s hospital. During this site visit, we interviewed 5 IT personnel and 7 doctors and nurses.

CURRENT BEHAVIOR In general, most physicians and medical staff use a shared device on the floor at a “gathering station” or patient’s room. They carry around devices such as tablets, pagers, cell phones, laptops, and also use fixed workstations, such as printers, monitors, and desktops. They access patient history and hospital records through virtual applications [4] on multiple devices.

From the site visit, we learned that doctors and nurses have two different primary behaviors for their work. Generally, doctors are more proactive in terms of learning and using new technologies. They are eager to adopt latest and greatest devices. They ask for iPad support on the first day of their work. In contrast, nurses are creatures of habit because they are very busy at the bedsides of patients. They use the same older technology and devices for most of their work.

One typical challenge that doctors face is focusing on their work, because in the hospital, doctors get a lot of

interruptions. This potentially leads to medical errors where they might forget to go back and enter information in a critical step. Another primary challenge is the time spent in dealing with technology. Doctors and nurses continually look for “workarounds” or “shortcuts” to shave off time while using applications. Also, in terms of being mobile, doctors constantly need to move around from patient to patient [Figure 1]. They sometimes face difficulty logging into different systems to get patients’ health records, as well as time-out issues with some medical applications. An overarching issue is the slowness [3] that is inherent with accessing virtual applications over the Internet. Another instance of slowness is when they broadcast live streaming surgery from one location to another; there cannot be a delay in video transmission.

NEEDS Below is a list of doctors’ needs on mobile devices and services:

• Quick access to clinical applications—less than 5 seconds every time they are launched

• Fast performing and responsive applications

• Access to devices must be secure, but painless to the user (e.g. no physical security tokens to authenticate, minimize the need for superfluous keystrokes.)

• All clinical apps that are considered mission critical apps need to be available on multiple devices.

IT Administrators’ Remote Work Experience In 2013 and 2014, Citrix conducted two studies to understand mobile work styles for IT admins. One was a site visit with Ericsson in Sweden. The other was an interview study with 40 IT admins and architects who are familiar with Citrix products [5].

CURRENT BEHAVIOR From these two studies, we learned that a typical IT admin’s work environment is an open desk with no walls and a dedicated collaboration area. Devices they use include IT managed Windows laptops and smartphones. Most IT admins also have personal devices, such as iPhone, iPad, and Mac with their business applications available on them.

IT admins are frequently “on-call” – they carry their laptops around and ensure they have Internet connectivity. They typically access or remote-in to their company environments, from anywhere and possibly on any device. They perceived personal laptops as being more modern, whereas company PCs are too big, too heavy, and too slow. In the case of Ericsson, the admins perceived iPads as more environmentally friendly, lighter, and faster. Also, iPads were considered as more than entertainment so Ericsson allowed the admins to use them for business purposes. However, the challenge with iPads is that they find it difficult to type lots of data, use advanced features or create presentations without a mouse and keyboard.

From the interviews, we learned that it is quite typical for IT admins to work outside of their office hours. For example, some of the IT admins mentioned that they usually logged back into the systems once they were at home. They collaborate with their teammates through chat (Microsoft Lync as the primary tool) all day.

NEEDS Below is a list of IT admins’ mobility needs:

• Need “applications working all the time” as they move from one meeting to another.

• Data and applications need to roam from device to device.

Figure 1: (Upper) The doctor is making rounds while logging in at workstation after seeing patients. (Below) The doctor is on the go with her iPad, stethoscope, pager, phone, patient sheet.

• Need reliable access from phones when they don’t have their laptops available on hand.

• Admins want to keep an eye on their work environment and monitor after-hours by receiving mobile-friendly alerts.

Design Implications and Expectations In this section, we briefly discuss some design implications regarding improving mobile work experiences.

Designing in Terms of Functionality Designing for admin mobility does not mean supporting all advanced functionality, because one small change to the system could have huge impact on the infrastructure. Any design needs to allow low-impact and repeatable tasks that are well suited to be performed through a mobile interface. While admins are on-the-go, there may be issues with connectivity, hence quick actions or changes that are not time-consuming to take effect, can be supported well.

Responsive Design & Security for Doctors Time and security are two primary design considerations for doctors. Since they use multiple devices from multiple locations, for security purposes, they have to login several times a day. Therefore the time to login and launch their applications affects their productivity. Securing every piece of data and access point, including mobile email, browsers, documents, and applications on multiple devices are also needed to be compliant with HIPAA [2] and HITECH [2].

Mobility IS Not the Same as Using Mobile Devices IT admins and doctors use all kinds of mobile devices everyday. While doctors and IT administrators are working remotely, they may perform critical complex

tasks. While they are mobile, the system design needs to take into account mobile design factors, such as form factor, ability to undo, etc., as well as selectively allowing high-impact activities, such as shutting down all machines easily, which may be risky if incorrectly designed or used. On the other hand, supporting mobility does not pertain only to using mobile devices, but also means domain experts can do productive work in different settings with systems that perform well and consistently.

Conclusion Given that domain-experts operate in a multitude of contexts and consume large amounts of information, research and design for their systems need to consider these context switches and meet performance expectations mentioned in this paper.

References [1] Bardram, Jack and Bossen C. (2005) Mobility Work: The Spatial Dimension of Collaboration at a Hospital. Computer Supported Coop Work 14:131-160.

[2] Citrix Solutions for Healthcare and HIPAA Compliance. www.citrix.com/content/dam/citrix/en_us/ documents/ products-solutions/citrix-solutions-for-healthcare-and-hipaa-compliance.pdf

[3] Deploying Extremely Latency-Sensitive Applications in VMware vSphere 5.5 http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/latency-sensitive-perf-vsphere55.pdf

[4] Dikaiakos, M.D., Katsaros, D., Mehra, P., Pallis, G. (2009) Cloud Computing: Distributed Internet Computing for IT and Scientific Research. Internet Computing, IEEE (Volume:13 , Issue: 5 )

[5] Top Use cases for Desktop Virtualization. http://citrixvirtualdesktops.com/documents/XD_Top10UseCases.pdf