1. stanford hci group undergraduate honors thesis Taskposé: A Dynamic Task-Based Window Management Aid Michael Bernstein mbernst@stanford.edu 01 June 2006 Thesis Advisor: Jeff Shrager, Symbolic Systems Second Reader: Terry Winograd, Computer Science

2. 06 June 20062 Honors Thesis The Problem  What goes with what?

3. 06 June 20063 Honors Thesis The Approach: Tasks  Task: a high-level goal toward which a person’s actions are directed  Can subsume sets of artifacts into larger task groupings

4. 06 June 20064 Honors Thesis Writing a Paper High-Level Task Organizing Force Piles and Files Physical World Draft 1 w/ Comments Rolodex Draft 2 Reference Book Artifacts

5. 06 June 20065 Honors Thesis Writing a Paper High-Level Task Digital World MS Word Document Browser Window MS Word Document 2 Browser Window 2 Browser Window 3 MS Outlook Yahoo! IM iTunes Organizing Force Artifacts Windows Taskbar

6. 06 June 20066 Honors Thesis My Focus: Windows  (The artifacts, not the operating system)  Likely to persist for the foreseeable future  Good (though not perfect) mapping onto artifacts of interest  Current approach is not scaling: Windows taskbar, OS X dock, Exposé

7. 06 June 20067 Honors Thesis Tasks and Windows Managers  Problem: How can a computer know when two windows are part of the same task?  The Agnostic Answer: It can’t. We’ll let users tell the computer which windows are related.  The Predictive Answer: There is some set of heuristics we can use to effectively predict which windows are semantically related.

8. 06 June 20068 Honors Thesis Agnostic Window Managers Task Gallery (Robertson et al.) Rooms (Card et al.) GroupBar (Smith et al.)

9. 06 June 20069 Honors Thesis Kimura (MacIntyre et al.) Predictive Windows Managers TaskTracer (Dragunov et al.)

10. 06 June 200610 Honors Thesis Task Classification  Work artifacts are placed strictly in one task  Binary: Is it part of this task, or no? MS Word Document Browser Window MS Word Document 2 Browser Window 2 Browser Window 3 MS Outlook Yahoo! IM iTunes

11. 06 June 200611 Honors Thesis What’s Wrong With This Picture?  “So, what task is this window part of?”  TaskTracer: “Users are often able to tell the system what it is not, but not what it is.”  Activity Based Computing: “The worst thing? Well [...] you need to constantly consider ‘where does this one belong’.”

12. 06 June 200612 Honors Thesis Anecdotally…  Log on to Amazon.com to buy a book, but get distracted by a related work. Are you still “buying a book?” Are you not “buying a book?”  Originally write a literature review for a paper, but later refer to it when creating slides. Is it still part of the “CHI Paper” task?

13. 06 June 200613 Honors Thesis Task Association, not Classification  Association: artifacts may identify with tasks at varying degrees  Strongly associated with one task  Weakly associated with several tasks  Associated with nothing at all  Aligns more closely with users’ mental models of their workspace

14. 06 June 200614 Honors Thesis The Goal: Taskposé  Build an associative window manager Group of related windows Movement occurs as heuristics are updated with additional knowledge

15. 06 June 200615 Honors Thesis Demo

16. 06 June 200616 Honors Thesis

17. 06 June 200617 Honors Thesis

18. 06 June 200618 Honors Thesis

19. 06 June 200619 Honors Thesis

20. 06 June 200620 Honors Thesis Association and Importance  Related windows appear closer together the more related Taskposé believes them to be.  Important windows appear larger and stay put, while unimportant windows shrink and move more.

21. 06 June 200621 Honors Thesis Implementation  Proof of Concept: not an algorithms thesis  WindowRank  Weighted Associations

22. 06 June 200622 Honors Thesis Evaluation  Weeklong user study  Found a high likelihood of integrating a “perfect” version of the system into regular work practice  Median 6/7 on a Likert scale

23. 06 June 200623 Honors Thesis Evaluation Cont’d  In interviews, confirmed that the visualization strategy was viable  None suggested that strict task groupings would have been preferred, or brought them up at all

24. 06 June 200624 Honors Thesis Evaluation Cont’d Again  Scaling  System most useful when open windows outstripped the capacity of the taskbar  Algorithms  Importance and relationship tracking algorithms were “passable”  Classes of problems: parent-child relationships, multiple simultaneous tasks

25. 06 June 200625 Honors Thesis Future Directions  Rethinking of classical machine learning algorithms  Other instantiations of the same idea  One-dimensional  Distance scaling

26. 06 June 200626 Honors Thesis Thank you!  Jeff Shrager  Symbolic Systems Program and Honors College (esp. Todd Davies)  Terry Winograd, Scott Klemmer, Erica Robles, Victoria Bellotti, Jim Thornton, Ed Chi, Duke Hutchings, Simone Stumpf, Jon Herlocker, Thomas Dietterich and the TaskTracer team, Greg Smith, Mary Czerwinski, Pat Langley, Stephen Voida, Jim Hollan, Adam Perer and Bjoern Hartmann