Job Performance Aids and You: How to Improve Organizational Efficiency Through Memory Enhancements
Co-Author: Kay Stanney
Working 9 to 5, what a way to make a living…barely getting by, it’s all taking and no giving
Let’s be honest, we’ve all been where Dolly sings about in her renowned song 9 to 5. Work is hard (no matter what industry you are in), and we sometimes struggle to remember every little detail, process, and fact that make up our daily job functions. We all just need a little help from time-to-time. Luckily, the powers-that-be have empathized with this and developed interactive tools called Job Performance Aids (or, JPAs) to help us along the way.
A JPA is any tool (or method) that helps someone complete a task — bonus points if it helps them do it more effectively and efficiently (Claypoole et al., 2021). In fact, you’ve probably used a JPA before — something as simple as an FAQ sheet for how to troubleshoot the office printer (yes, it’s jammed…again!) or as complex as a nuclear power plant flow chart for emergency shut-offs are JPAs. Even those incredibly vague IKEA assembly instructions are technically job aids (though they definitely don’t get the bonus points for helping us do the task efficiently)!
JPAs have many known aliases — they are also referred to as job aids, performance aids, Electronic Performance Support Systems (EPSS), performance supports, job guides, skill performance aids, procedural guides, and more (Campbell, 1996). No matter what you call them, JPAs help facilitate and guide people while they work to enable consistent job performance and reduce errors.
Why do JPAs Work so Well?
JPAs are helpful because they organize important, but hard to remember, details in an easy to use physical (or digital) format. So, instead of your brain having to store and recall that information, the JPA essentially does it for you (kind of like an external hard drive)! JPAs work because they offload our memory requirements (and constraints) onto the JPA. Normally, when we have to perform a task (like jumpstarting a car or changing the office toner), we have to recall information about that task (e.g., basic facts, steps, etc.) from our long-term memory and pull it into our working memory in order to act upon it. Our long-term memory is essentially limitless, but is unfortunately super prone to memory retrieval errors or difficulties. Long story short, we can theoretically store anything and everything into our long-term memories, but it’s really hard for us to retrieve those memories perfectly (which is why we have memory errors and we forget things). JPAs come in to save the day by reducing our reliance on memory recall and allow us to simply recognize the information we need to act on. This “recognition over recall” is why JPAs are so effective — we simply have to recognize the correct information from the JPA to support our work activities. User experience designers regularly incorporate recognition over recall as a design best practice for developing products and tools (see more from the Nielson Norman Group here). This phenomenon is so powerful because it reduces the amount of effort we have to spend on completing tasks, ultimately making things easier, which is the heart and soul of a JPA. By simply leveraging the goodness of the JPA and recognizing relevant information regarding our tasks, we are much more likely to complete that task more efficiently and without error, all while expending less mental effort– a true win/win situation (especially for our tired and overworked brains).
Tips for Developing Helpful JPAs
Now that we know how powerful JPAs can be, it’s good to keep in mind that not all JPAs are created equal. As with everything in life, some things are better than others…and JPAs are no exception. If you are thinking about developing JPAs for your organization, the first thing you need to do is determine the most appropriate format for your JPA. JPAs can come in all shapes and sizes, like procedural guides, worksheets, flow charts, and more. When selecting the appropriate format for your JPA, remember that not all formats will be suitable for your task. Campbell (1996) provides a comprehensive review of which formats work best for different types of tasks. Once you determined the most appropriate format, follow the five tips below to ensure that your JPA is a Chanel and not trash bag.
1. Simple
JPAs should be as simple as possible! The whole purpose of a JPA is to provide effective and efficient support, so if you want the users of your JPA to be more effective and efficient, then your JPA needs to be structured with this in mind. Use informal language and avoid jargon. Why call something a vehicular splashguard when everyone in your organization knows it as a mudflap? JPAs are not the place to get fancy with words — make sure your language can be readily understood. Support content should be clear, concise, and easy to act upon. For example, when at the Verizon store the other day, the (very nice) customer service representative asked my baby-boomer dad to “enact multifunctionality” on his device…when he could have simply said “use two apps at once” and reduced the confusion for everyone involved. Simplicity also refers to the look and feel of the JPA as well — no need to use loud, busy colors and over-the-top callout boxes. Make the design simple; less is more when it comes to the design of a JPA. Remember all that goodness we talked about earlier related to reducing memory constraints? Well don’t throw away all those gains on an unnecessarily cluttered design that requires a ton of mental effort to weed through and process.
2. Easy to Use
Similar to Tip 1, a JPA should be easy to use, both physically and mentally. When formatting the JPA, think about how your organization is going to actually use it. Are they sitting at a desk? Are they crawling under a vehicle? The operational environment here matters. Do not physically design your JPA to be a multipage checklist that someone has to unfold six times to see an entire step in order to use if they are in a tight environment and already using their hands for performing the task. This is a place where burgeoning augmented reality (AR) technology may come in handy, as a worker could crawl under a vehicle and perform a task while being guided by a JPA in an AR headset. On the mental aspect, take great care to ensure that your organization isn’t going to spend a ton of mental effort trying to even understand the JPA. If personnel of varying proficiency levels are to use the JPA, then a multi-level or adaptive design may be appropriate to ensure mental workload associated with JPA use is kept in check.
3. Contextualized
Where appropriate, always contextualize your JPA. This means provide figures (or videos, if it’s digital) to show how a step in a procedure works or what a certain outcome looks like. This is especially helpful for steps that can be vague or ambiguous. Maybe you really do have to call those things “Component A and Component Z,” so why not show your users what Component A looks like when attached to Component Z? A picture here for reference will make the execution of this step so much easier. Here again is a place where AR technology may be suitable, as multimedia can easily be displayed in an AR headset while performing a task.
4. Informative
This tip may seem like you are getting conflicting advice, but it’s important to be as informative as you can, while still being simple and easy to use. Details are critical, but do not provide so many details that the user gets lost in the weeds and comes out even more confused than before. Provide just enough information that your organization can perform the task through recognition not recall — workers should have a baseline knowledge for the information within the JPA (see Tip 5), so we just want to jog their brain to provide a much needed assist, NOT train them on the fly (again, see Tip 5). So, find that line and walk it like a tightrope!
5. Not Training!
This isn’t really a tip, more of a reminder…JPAs are not training. JPAs should not be used in place of formal training. You cannot expect people to learn new skills, abilities, or knowledge purely from JPAs. JPAs are great for providing an assist, but they can’t take the shot for us. We still need really great training programs to develop the skillsets needed to support execution of the tasks JPAs help us with. Do not develop a JPA with the expectation that it can serve as, or worse replace, formal training.
The Future of JPAs
JPAs date all the way back to World War II and have been relatively unchanged since. Even with all the technological advanced of the last century, JPAs have remained relatively unchanged. In fact, most JPA developers still advocate for paper-based JPAs due to the high cost associated with developing digital formats. However, now that the fourth industrial revolution is upon us, which involves automation of traditional manufacturing and industrial practices using emerging technologies, what will JPAs look like in the near and distant future? To explore this new horizon, we need to look no further than spatial computing. Augmented reality and digital twins (DTs) are poised to truly revolutionize the JPA game.
AR enhances the real-world environment by displaying computer-generated content — often in the form of visual and auditory experiences. Visual elements are often presented by 2D and 3D objects seamlessly overlaid onto the real world. Further, AR has the processing capabilities to spatialize all of the augmented content, meaning that augmented information can be tied to specific geo-spatial locations. AR allows for the visualization of complex spatial relationships, which is perfect for next-generation JPAs. In fact, AR-based JPAs actually already exist, and are being used on the Navy’s newest aircraft carrier (Claypoole et al., 2020). AR makes JPAs even more powerful because this technology allows all those important details to be digitally tied to the real-world through augmented content and displayed just-in-time for use. Imagine using an AR-based JPA when assembling furniture — no more second guessing if this shelf really connects with that table leg — the spatialized augmented content shows you EXACTLY what goes where and how to do it. The benefits of AR-based JPAs are immense; obviously they can provide more explicit detail, but they can also significantly reduce errors, increase productivity, and motivate and engage workers with their job tasks. As spatial computing capabilities continue to grow more powerful, AR-based JPAs will continue to rise and help increase the productivity of workers everywhere.
AR technologies are becoming increasingly more commercially available with tech giants like Microsoft working to make them a household commodity. At the same time, DTs are emerging within many organization, where more of the physical world is being represented in digital space via models and algorithms that characterize the inter-workings of individual pieces of equipment, whole factories, supply chains, product life cycles, and more. Simply put, DTs show us the real-time state and health of physical objects. For JPAs, this means that DTs can provide real-time insight into the objects we work with, as we work with them. This will be tremendously helpful for tasks that require troubleshooting — what better JPA could there be than one that tells you exactly what effect you are having on an object? Did you just restart your computer in hopes of getting rid of that error message? Well, here’s your JPA coming in to save the day by telling you exactly what is going on within the hard-drive of that computer right now. DTs have been around since the early 2000s, but they are just starting to be implemented across industries. So, their impact on JPAs may be a little bit down the road…but imagine the possibilities of having access to all of that information in a JPA form where the DT is merged with the JPA to not only display real-time information regarding an object, but also providing procedural advice for what steps to take next. Talk about Working 9 to 5, you’ve got passion and a vision…cause it’s hustlin’ time, a whole new way to make a livin’…
References
Claypoole, V. L., Killingsworth, C. D., Hodges, C. A., Riley, J. M., & Stanney, K. M. (2021). Multimodal Interactions within Augmented Reality Operational Support Tools for Shipboard Maintenance. In: Human-Automation Interaction: Manufacturing, Services and UX.
Claypoole, V. L., Stanney, K. M., Padron, C. K., & Perez, R. (2020). Enhancing Naval Enterprise Readiness through Augmented Reality Knowledge Extraction. In Proceedings of the Interservice/Industry Training, Simulation, and Education Conference (I/ITSEC) Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL.
Campbell, C. P. (1996). Job performance aids. Journal of European Industrial Training, 20(6), 3–21.
