It’s Still Frustrating! Human-Centered Approaches to Data in Enterprise PC Maintenance

Abstract

HCI tends to treat the humble office computer as a solved problem, yet most office workers still experience frustration when IT helpdesks need to be called. Why does this apparently “solved” problem persist? The software/hardware stack on a standard enterprise computer involves an astounding variety of possible drivers and application versions that can conflict with one another, leading to greater opportunity for breakdown, regardless of skills or resources of IT organizations. This circumstance lends itself to the use of telemetry and artificial intelligence (AI) for problem diagnosis and stokes aspirations of fully automating enterprise PC maintenance. To explore the human and organizational factors at work in applying data and AI to this problem, we designed a series of exploratory studies at a large technology company in the United States: (1) remote diary study with semi-structured interviews (n = 30), (2) quasi-experimental study with pretest-posttest design (n = 11), and (3) ethnographic study with open-ended interviews (n = 8). The results show that user frustration with malfunctioning PCs persisted because of the sociotechnical dynamic between employees, PCs, and IT support. Feedback loops between employees and IT played a central role in dialing up or tamping down frustration that accumulated over the long term. The results also indicate that telemetry and AI could provide new opportunities to tamp down user frustration when data were treated as a communication medium between employees and IT support. The results suggest three major design recommendations for preventing frustration buildup: (1) Redesigning PC telemetry data and transparency mechanisms to support two-way communication between IT and users, including shared analysis of malfunctioning data; (2) considering users’ buildup of frustration, not just the quality of any single interaction, when designing any IT service solutions; (3) incorporating uses of technology that embrace human-AI collaboration technologies not to automate IT troubleshooting work but to support the human creativity necessary for troubleshooting. Utilizing the design principles we identified in this study, there is a need for further research and development to explore novel feedback systems between enterprise PC users and IT.