SMU Associate Professor of Accounting (Education) Seow Poh Sun works at the intersection of accounting, information technology and human behaviour. To study how the design of a decision aid can affect the decision making process, Associate Prof Seow conducted an experiment where 94 students in an Accounting Information Systems class received a case narrative of a company’s sales process. Their task was to identify all internal control activities present in the case narrative, and to suggest additional control activities that were missing from the narrative. His experiment revealed that the degree of structural restrictiveness is an important aspect in the design of decision aids. A more restrictive design imposes more limits on users by forcing users to adapt their decision making process to match the decision aid, he said. Associate Prof Seow also studies human interactions with information technology, with a special focus on the accountancy sector.