Re: Robot interviews
. . . or mayhap, zombies:
On a serious note, it is hard to draw conclusions from this one isolated test scenario. Findings like this make interesting headlines and newsbytes, but rarely go beyond that. The report suggests some interesting lines of research. If only we had the attention span and capability to pursue it systematically.
It would be interesting to have data on several points:
How having gone through the process with pencil and paper affected the second pass through; and what would have happened if the sequence had been reversed.
There is clearly a technological dimension--an observation is that people are often post things that they would never say or do in person.
But variability in the user's facility with the mode of entry may also play a role. In the US at least, there are school districts where cursive writing is no longer taught. We have an 17 year old grandson, who cannot read our letters. (He gets A's in his courses). On the other hand I had a colleague whose technophobia was so intense that she literally could not force herself to press a key on the keyboard. Facility with the mode will directly affect the subjects "productivity."
An overarching problem (IMHO a direct cause of the IT failures that were the subject of another post) is that there are serious gaps in our understanding of how the human system interface works, and rarely, in my experience take time to think it through.
This is getting worse rather than better.