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Designing Technology as an Embedded Resource for Troubleshooting

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Abstract

In this paper we describe a number of technologies which we designed to provide support for customers troubleshooting problems with their office devices. The technologies aim to support both self-conducted and expert-supported troubleshooting and to provide a seamless route from one type of support to another. The designs are grounded in the findings of an ethnographic study of a troubleshooting call centre for office devices. We examine the properties of different assemblies of people, resources, technologies and spaces to inspire design for the different troubleshooting situations. Through our fieldwork and our technology envisionments we uncovered a number of dislocations between various aspects of the troubleshooting assemblies: (1) a physical dislocation between the site of the problem and the site of problem resolution; (2) a conceptual dislocation between the users’ knowledge and the troubleshooting resources and (3) a logical dislocation between the support resources and the status of the ailing device itself. The technologies that we propose attempt to address these dislocations by embedding the troubleshooting resources in the device itself, thus harmonizing the various elements and capturing, where possible, the haecceities—the ‘just thisness’—of each particular troubleshooting situation.

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Notes

  1. Interestingly, this creates a paradox around user testing – how can you prove a concept is valid, rather than its look and feel.

  2. For legal reasons only the troubleshooter side of telephone conversation was audio recorded. Customer utterances were recorded in the field notes. Examples consist of transcripts of the troubleshooters turn (TS) and summaries of the customers (C) turns in two formats. (1) ‘C reports lines across the page’ summarises what the customer said. (2) A dash e.g. ‘C—ok’ indicates more precise wording.

  3. We are well aware that this will only be possible in the cases where the parts of the device that are broken do not interfere with the parts of the device being used to fix it. We believe these cases are fewer and in these cases, customers would need to resort to original web-based and telephone support.

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Acknowledgements

We thank Aaron Kaplan, Claude Roux, Karin Pettersson, Jonina Selin, Ye Deng and Victor Ciriza for their contributions to the design of the refinement mechanisms and the on-the-box interaction; Nicola Cancedda for his contribution to the method for avoiding repeated troubleshooting interactions on devices and Graham Button and Peter Tolmie for their contribution to the analysis of the fieldwork and initial concept design.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Xerox Research Centre Europe, 6, , Chemin de Maupertuis, 38240, Meylan, France

    Stefania Castellani, Antonietta Grasso, Jacki O’Neill & Frederic Roulland

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  1. Stefania Castellani
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  2. Antonietta Grasso
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  3. Jacki O’Neill
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  4. Frederic Roulland
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Correspondence to Stefania Castellani.

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Castellani, S., Grasso, A., O’Neill, J. et al. Designing Technology as an Embedded Resource for Troubleshooting. Comput Supported Coop Work 18, 199–227 (2009). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-008-9088-1

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10606-008-9088-1

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