Activity based computing Rahul Nair Advisor : Dr. Elizabeth Mynatt Collaborator: Steve Voida 22 April 2004

History of Kimura Multitasking support Peripheral displays Background Awareness Montage visualizations

Motivation People seldom perform simple atomic actions Look at the big picture Lots of tools to do individual stuff No good way to tie in all the work related to an “activity” But we don’t know what an “activity” is...

What is an activity? Different for each individual Granularity varies – “Getting a masters” – “Printing a paper” How do people think about activity? – Micro level – Monolithic – Hierarchical

Goals Learn about users mental model Collect the artifacts of an activity Look for links between actions on a computer and activities Can we use actions to predict/classify activities?

Study Design Alternatives Ethnographic – Really difficult to follow people around – Limited manpower available Diary study – Users often forget to note down tasks Experience Sampling – Good compromise between the two – Can be made adaptive and context aware

Study Design Pre-study questionnaire Record user activities over a 2 week period – Documents – information – Web pages – Window activity Users name each activity Long semi structured post study interview

Software Visual basic application for window, web page and PDF tracking – Detect task changes using window rhythms – Pop ups to remind users to name tasks – Adapt to user feedback VBA code for Outlook, Word and Excel Instrumented version of Pine

Pilot study 3 users over a one week period Web pages and contacts provide good identification Accuracy is dependant on users task granularity – Varies from 40-80% Need more data to draw final conclusions

Current status Started last week Currently have 8 users – Grad students, professors, non academic users Try to get the widest possible range of users Interviews at the end of the two weeks

Future work Data analysis Find a common task model for users Integrate with Kimura Indexing activities to aid recall Possible release as a time management tool

Questions? Would you like to participate?

Related work Virtual workspaces – Rooms, virtual desktop managers, etc... Multitasking studies – Gonzalez 04, Czerwinski 04 studies – Bellotti, Gwizdka 02