Impact of Self-Determined vs. Fixed Training on Biometric and Usability Performance

This study investigated the impact of training on biometric and usability performance measures. A simple and inexpensive method for instructing/training people to use a biometric device is to have a poster that depicts the steps required to capture fingerprint images. However, a study by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NISTIR 7403, 2007) indicated that participants who used poster instructions had more difficulty performing the fingerprint task than did participants trained through verbal and video instructions. This outcome can be questioned, though, because participants instructed by poster could proceed with the task whenever they were ready, whereas the verbal and video instructions were for fixed durations. Consequently, the poster was inspected for a much shorter duration on average than were the verbal and video instructions. In this experiment, we sought to determine the influence of this factor on performance. Two groups of college students received training with a poster that outlined the interaction for a particular fingerprint reader and then performed the fingerprint task. The first group self-determined how long to examine the poster, as in the NIST study, while the second group was required to examine the poster for a fixed duration of 50s, comparable to that used in the other conditions of the NIST study.