What a To-Do: Studies of Task Management Towards the Design of a Personal Task List Manager

Speaker
Victoria Bellotti
Senior Member of Research Staff, PARC

When
-

Where
Newell-Simon Hall 1305 (Michael Mauldin Auditorium)

Description

This presentation reports on the results of studies of task management to support the design of an intelligent task management tool, KPad. Ethnographers at PARC examined the media used to record and organize to-dos and how tasks are completed over time. Our work shows that, contrary to popular wisdom, people are not poor at prioritizing. Rather they have well-honed strategies for tackling particular task management challenges. By illustrating what factors influence task completion and how representations function to support task management, our work at PARC is intended to provide a strong foundation for the design of a personal to-do list manager. This work was sponsored by DARPA/IPTO under SPAWAR Contract N66001-03-C-8010.

Speaker's Bio

Victoria Bellotti is a Senior Member of Research Staff in the Computer Science Lab at PARC. She studies current and prospective technology users to understand their work-practice, their problems and their requirements for future technology. She also designs novel systems and works on analyzing existing or proposed technology design for utility and usability and on finding ways to improve them. Victoria is a co-inventor on numerous pending patent applications for user-centered systems. She is active in the professional Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) community, giving frequent invited presentations, with many peer reviewed publications and has reviewed, chaired and edited numerous publications in the field. Victoria studied psychology, ergonomics and HCI at London University in the UK. After that she worked at Xerox’s Cambridge Research Lab (EuroPARC) for five years. She came to the USA in 1994 to work in Apple’s Advanced Technology Group for three years before moving back to Xerox to work at PARC in Palo Alto. Her research interests include Information and Task management, Computer Supported Cooperative Work, Computer Mediated Communication and Ubiquitous Computing.

Host
Sara Kiesler