Quantified Factory Worker: Designing a Worker Feedback Dashboard

Date: 
Wednesday 3 October 2018
Timeslot: 
14:00-14:25
Organisers or author: 
Päivi Heikkilä, Anita Honka, Eija Kaasinen

Full paper.

Factory work is changing towards knowledge work, demanding problem-solving skills and managing complexity. Providing factory workers the possibility to receive meaningful self-tracking feedback at work, could empower them to cope better with the increasing complexity of their work. We apply the Quantified Self approach to factory work by introducing the concept and prototype of a Worker Feedback Dashboard, which presents various automatically tracked well-being and work performance metrics to workers. Based on user interviews, we created user experience goals for the Dashboard, and identified the following design implications: Keep positive (but truthful), Give personal feedback, Enable reflection, and Do not disturb the worker. After designing the prototype, we studied its user acceptance. Even though the interviewed factory workers’ first reactions to tracking personal metrics at work were rather negative, the attitudes became more positive after presenting the prototype. The results encourage implementing the Worker Feedback Dashboard prototype to a functional application.