Study says we are wasting 20% ​​of our time on computer problems

Even though our computers are better now than they were 15 years ago, they still malfunction 11%-20% of the time, concludes a new study from the University of Copenhagen and Roskilde University. The researchers behind the study found that society would receive huge benefits by rethinking systems and involving users more in their development.

An endlessly spinning beach ball, a program that crashes without saving data or a system that requires illogical procedures or simply doesn’t work: unfortunately, struggling with computers is still a problem for most of us. It is a familiar situation. Pulling your hair out at non-working computers is all too common among users, according to new Danish research.

So much so, in fact, that on average, we waste 11%-20% of our time in front of our computers on systems that don’t work or are so difficult to understand that we can’t do what we want to do. And it’s far from being good enough, says Professor Kaspar Hornbeck, one of the study’s researchers.

“It is unbelievable that this figure is so high. However, most people experience frustration when using a computer and can tell a horror story about an important PowerPoint presentation that was not saved or a system that failed to save an important crashed in the moment. Everyone knows that it is difficult to build IT systems that match people’s needs, but this figure should be very low, and one thing it shows is that when the system developed, the common people are not involved enough,” he says.

Professor Morten Hertzum, the other researcher behind the study, emphasizes that most frustrations are experienced in relation to the performance of completely ordinary tasks.

“People’s frustration is not because people are using their computers for something overly advanced, but because they experience problems performing everyday tasks. This allows users to identify problems. It becomes easier to incorporate in. But it also means that problems that are not identified and resolved will likely frustrate a large number of users,” says Morten Hertzum.

problems are very recognizable

To investigate this issue, researchers were assisted by 234 participants who spent six to eight hours in front of a computer in their daily work.

Over the course of an hour, the researchers asked them to report situations in which the computer would not function properly, or where participants were frustrated by not being able to perform the task they intended.

The problems most frequently experienced by participants included: “The system was slow,” “The system shut down temporarily,” “The system crashed,” “It’s hard to find things.” The participants’ backgrounds ranged from students, accountants, consultants, but many of them actually worked in the IT industry.

“Many of the survey participants were IT professionals, while most of the other participants were highly competent IT and computer users. Nevertheless, they faced these problems, and it turns out that there are some basic tasks involved,” Kasper Hornbeck They say.

Survey participants also responded that 84% of episodes had happened before and 87% were likely to happen again. And, according to Caspar Hornbeck, we face the same fundamental problems today as we did 15–20 years ago.

“The two biggest categories of problems are still insufficient performance and lack of user-friendliness,” he says.

“Our technology today can do more, and it has gotten better, but at the same time, we expect more from it,” says Morten Hertzum. Even though downloads are now faster, they are often disappointing are experienced relatively slowly.”

88% use computers at work

According to Statistics Denmark, 88% of Danes used a computer, laptop, smartphone, tablet or other mobile device at work in 2018. In this context, new studies indicate that half to a full day of a normal working week may be wasted due to computer problems.

Kasper Hornbeck says, “Workplaces all over Denmark have lost a lot of productivity because people are not able to do their normal work because the computer is not running the way it should. It can also be very frustrating for the individual user. Becomes the reason for.”

This means that if we have to face less problems in front of our computers, there will be huge benefits to the society. According to Kasper Hornbeck, for example, gains can be made if more resources are invested in rethinking how defects are presented to us on computers.

“Part of the solution may be to keep us from knowing that the computer is working to solve a problem. In fact, there’s no reason why we should be stuck with an incomprehensible box with commands or a frozen computer.” Need to see. The computer could easily solve the problems it encountered without displaying it, while it provided a back-up version of the system for us, so that we could continue with our tasks without any hindrance,’ ‘ says Kasper Hornbeck.

Also, IT developers should involve users even more when designing systems to make them as easy as possible to use and understand, because according to the researcher, there are no bad IT users, only bad systems. .

“When we are all surrounded by IT systems that we are cursing, it is very healthy to recognize that the problem is probably not the users, but those who make up the systems. The study clearly shows that still There is a lot of room for improvement, and so we hope that it can focus more on creating a more user-friendly system in the future,” concluded Kasper Hornbeck.