Recent Shortcuts: Using Recent Interactions to Support Shared Activities

Speaker
John Tang
IBM Research, Almaden

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

Recent Shortcuts is a research prototype that makes recently used computer objects easily accessible for quick re-use, especially in support of sharing information with other colleagues. Its design emerged from an empirical study that focused on how users integrate information across computer tools to coordinate with their colleagues. The analysis revealed the amount of extraneous individual work needed to enable collaboration: finding references to other people, finding files to attach to email, managing incoming email attachments, etc. Much of this work involved finding recently accessed objects that are needed again in the user’s current task focus. These observations led to the design of Recent Shortcuts, which enables quick access to files, file folders, received attachments, people, and groups of people with which the user recently interacted for re-use in the user’s current context. Recent Shortcuts makes it easy to use these objects across applications with no additional user input and minimal changes to the user’s applications or work practice. Early user experiences with a working prototype led to an extension that integrates recently accessed objects across multiple devices.

Speaker's Bio

John C. Tang is a Research Staff Member at the Almaden Research Center of IBM Research. John’s research interests focus on understanding the needs of users and designing new technology to support collaboration. He likes to apply a mix of qualitative (interviews, surveys, video-based observation) and quantitative (usage logs) methods to understand how people currently accomplish their work, leading to new design insights for tools to support their work. John received his Ph.D. from Stanford University, and worked on shared drawing prototypes at Xerox PARC and tools to support collaboration and awareness at Sun Microsystems, Inc.

Host
Susan Fussell