Investigating the Impact of Task Change Type and Transparency on Transfer of Learning

This article investigates users' transfer of learning on two e-mail platforms with different transparency levels and task change types. The objective is to provide implication on task design in product upgrading. A mixed design of 4 (types of task change)?×?2 (transparency)?×?2 blocks (Hotmail and Outlook platform) within-subjects design and 3 levels of expertise between-subjects design, both having repeated measures on type of task change and transparency, was used to evaluate participants' transfer of learning. A main effect of both transparency and task change type is expected. High-transparency tasks are expected to lead to higher performance than low-transparency tasks. Commission task changes are expected to lead to lower performance than other types of task change due to the addition of new task steps. The results showed that commission task changes led to the greatest disturbance on user performance, whereas performance is best during sequence task changes in which participants have a positive transfer in performance time per step and no increase in error ratio. Participants also showed better transfer of learning in high-transparency tasks. The conclusion is that transparency level is critical in the future design of product changes. A refined design approach is necessary to ensure that the design tasks are highly transparent to users. In addition, to facilitate user's transfer of learning, commission task changes should be reduced and sequence task changes should be increased.