Future Challenges for Applied Experimental Psychology 665trust: Which aspects of the design of automated systems re-
sult in users’ trusting that they will accomplish their intended
purposes (M. J. Adams, Tenney, & Pew, 1991; Parasuraman
& Riley, 1997)? Such systems take the human operator out of
the loop. Operators tend to lose situation awareness concern-
ing the state of the system and the environment in which it is
operating (Endsley, 1996; Endsley & Kiris, 1995). If not de-
signed properly, automated systems can lead to complacency;
if the computer is managing one’s system, one is no longer
responsible for what goes wrong. Human-centered design
that takes account of the user from the initial stages of system
conceptualization is required if this kind of misuse of au-
tomation is to be prevented.
The introduction of computers and telephone call routers
into our communication infrastructure is imposing a cold, im-
personal, automated intermediary—and in some cases not
just an intermediary, but an ultimate adjudicator in control of
the information resources one is trying to tap. Machines are
performing more and more of the communication functions
that in the past have involved person-to-person connections.
Applied psychologists need to challenge the ways in which
these systems are designed. We need to create ways to
achieve the same level of efficiency without resorting to such
uncommunicative alternatives.
Work on these kinds of problems can take place within an
academic, government, or industrial setting. Progress is not
likely to be made by the social planner, the economist, the po-
litical scientist, or even by the engineer who is focused solely
on technology. Progress will be made by individuals who un-
derstand human behavior and are motivated to improve the
human use of technology by providing objective data show-
ing how improvements could be made and by influencing the
design process directly at the interface between the human
user and the technology itself.
With the rapidly expanding use of the internet for business
purposes, many jobs have come into existence that were un-
heard of a short time ago. Most of these jobs require the use
of computers for one or another purpose, and many of them
involve working with geographically distributed groups. The
need for new tools to support the performance of the new
tasks and to facilitate collaboration among dispersed mem-
bers of a team, for techniques to coordinate distributed work,
for approaches to management that work well with distrib-
uted groups, for effective methods of information finding and
resource sharing—these and many other needs associated
with jobs being created by information technology represent
opportunities for applied experimental work (Attewell, Huey,
Moray, & Sanderson, 1995; Gould, 1995).
The Internet and associated technologies are affecting us
in many ways in addition to their effects on business and
work. They have profound implications as well for education,
entertainment, interperson communication, and many other
aspects of our lives. An especially noteworthy development
is the rapid increase in the amount of information that is
available to the computer user through resources epitomized
by the World Wide Web, which has been growing by approx-
imately 1 million electronic pages a day (Members of the
CleverProject, 1999). The Web contains information on every
conceivable subject, and what it contains covers the full range
with respect to intelligibility and accuracy.
A major challenge relating to the future of technology,
from a user’s point of view, is to provide tools and methods
that will make it easy for one to get quickly to information
one wants without having to attend to an excess of material in
which one has no interest. A variety of search engines cur-
rently exist, but while they are unquestionably useful for
many purposes, their operation is often frustratingly slow,
and the ratio of false positives to hits in their returns is unac-
ceptably high. As Bosak and Bray (1999) put it, the “Internet
is a speed-of-light network that often moves at a crawl; and
although nearly every kind of information is available on-
line, it can be maddeningly difficult to find the one piece you
need” (p. 89).
These problems will become increasingly severe as the
number of sites continues to grow at an exponential rate. Ad-
dressing them effectively will require advances on several
fronts, including the design of languages for organizing
information (Bosak & Bray, 1999) and the development of
more efficient search techniques (Members of the Clever
Project, 1999). The value of any technological advance in
this area resides, however, in the extent to which it helps
people interact effectively with extremely large databases;
the design and evaluation of tools to facilitate that interaction
deserve more attention from psychological researchers than
they have received, and the importance of these topics as
possible foci of research can only increase.
Although for convenience we have organized these com-
ments under the topics “psychological,” “social,” and “tech-
nological,” the limitations of this partitioning are apparent
when one considers the challenges that information (com-
puter and communication) technology represents to psycho-
logical research in the future. Many visions of what the future
holds in this regard have been published; one readily accessi-
ble example is Scientific American’s special report on MIT’s
Oxygen Project (1999). The vision motivating this effort in-
cludes not only powerful information resources in the hands
of nearly everyone and the potential of a manifold increase in
human productivity but also, as conditions of realization,
great increases in the ease of use of the devices that connect
people with the networked resources (Dertouzos, 1999). Ease