Technology users are technology observers as well, monitoring for problems or opportunities that might arise. Designing interfaces to support the monitoring of technology presents unique challenges for everything from detecting situations to responding to situations to changing the tools to match a changing operating environment or the observer's changing knowledge....
It has commonly been observed that a person's performance on a self-regulation activity is often impaired when he or she has already performed a prior task that requires substantial self-regulation, a phenomenon termed as the regulatory depletion effect. The prevailing explanation for this effect, as reported in the literature, is...