The snow, the dirt and the smartphone : exploring mobile technology use by blue-collar mobile workers

Abstract

The utilization of mobile phones has led to higher levels of accountability among blue-collar mobile field workers, who mostly rely on the physical performance of their work. Nowadays, maintenance and construction employees are responsible to report information about their work practices and outcomes through mobile technology in the field to greater extents than when reporting was done by filling paper forms. Such data serves the back office to administrate movement of resources such as trucks and supplies required in the work tasks and to monitor manual labour carried out in dispersed locations or when isolated in the field. Mobile workers face various limitations and mental workloads arising from their distinctive technical work conditions and due to their spatial mobility, which affect their ability to interact with devices and to comply with workplace demands. Further, the complexity of their work tasks often increases due to no readily available information technology solutions. As a result, mobile workers often experience uncertainty and ambiguity when reporting and processing information, which can subsequently hinder work in the field instead of supporting it. The main aim of this study is to learn how different contextual limitations and usability issues affect the practices of utilizing mobile phones for the purpose of reporting data in the field. Focus is put on the study context of M-Reporting, a mobile application through which the thesis explores the practices of reporting task-related data by maintainers, drivers and construction workers. A field study guided by the contextual inquiry data-collection technique was conducted amongst 12 participants carrying out their real tasks and interacting with ICTs across nine work sites. The field study enabled collecting rich qualitative data which was interpreted and analyzed. The findings were analyzed by using theoretical analysis frameworks on mobility. To assess the usability of M-Reporting, Hertzum’s method of usability analysis was applied. The findings reveal that workers face different contextual limitations that negatively affect their ability to report from the field. As a result, workers were found to improvise by delaying data entry, by favoring available alternatives to report and by prioritizing their other work tasks when there was no compelling need to report immediately. In addition, workers were found to develop particular reporting habits due to situational and organizational usability issues. In order to better adopt the process of reporting by blue-collar mobile workers within the field, future process improvement considerations were drawn and presented to the service provider and to the blue-collar mobile workplace.