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Behaviors and Expectations: Exploring
Mobile Work Style for Domain Expert
Users
Ashley Pan
Abstract
Citrix Systems, Inc.
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.
4980 Great America Pkwy
Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA
[email protected]
Smitha Papolu
Citrix System, Inc.
4980 Great America Pkwy
Santa Clara, CA 95054 USA
[email protected]
Author Keywords
Collaboration; Mobility; Remote Work; Security
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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
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.
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.
Our research is motivated by three questions:
1. What is the “mobile work style” for domain-expert
users such as doctors and IT admins?
Behaviors and Expectations
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
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:
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.
• 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.
• 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 timeconsuming 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-forhealthcare-and-hipaa-compliance.pdf
[3] Deploying Extremely Latency-Sensitive Applications
in VMware vSphere 5.5
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/latencysensitive-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_Top10
UseCases.pdf