Incorporating user control in automated interactive scheduling systems

In this paper, we report our findings on the impact of providing users with varying degrees of control in an automated interactive scheduling system. While automated scheduling techniques such as constraint optimization have been widely adopted in a variety of scheduling applications, such applications require that users relinquish a certain amount of control to the system. The implications of such a shift in control are not clear for people who oversee the scheduling of human activities, for example, case managers scheduling patient appointments in hospitals and clinics. We asked our participants to use a working prototype system for clinic scheduling to complete a series of scheduling problems that we designed. We varied the size of the problems - -i.e., the number of patients to be scheduled - -and the style of interaction in ways that are associated with different degrees of user control. We recorded standard usability metrics and conducted post-task written surveys and interviews. Our results suggest that although maintaining full user control decreases efficiency as the problem becomes larger, the participants still preferred to have full user control in completing scheduling tasks. We end with design implications in supporting users' increased acceptance of automated scheduling systems.