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– Email 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 email 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

Email studies– Bellotti, Gwizdka 02