Configural Changes and Human Performance in a Telephone Wiring Task

Abstract

The “quick clip” connector is one of several types of wire terminals currently used in the telecommunications industry. In the standard systems in use today, the “quick clip” connectors are arranged in horizontal rows, with the terminated wire pairs entering both from the top and from the bottom. Because this arrangement has several potential drawbacks, two experiments were designed to explore the effects of changing row orientation and direction of wire entry on human performance with these connectors. The first experiment compared the standard configuration with horizontal rows to a rotated version with vertical rows. The second experiment compared the bi-directional standard configuration to two uni-directional configurations, one requiring wire cutoff on the “up” side of the connector rows and one requiring cutoff on the “down” side. For both experiments, eight male subjects were asked to perform repeated cycles of a telephone wiring task. Half of the subjects were well-practiced on this task, and half were novices. The main dependent variables of interest were speed and frequency of errors.