Authoring Relational Queries on the Mobile Devices

AbstractIn this paper, we present the design and implementation of a graphical user interface to interact with a relational database management system on touch screen based mobile devices. Our system allows users to author arbitrary graphical relational queries on the touch screen using a collection of on-screen widgets and gestures. The user can interact, introspect and integrate pieces of sub-queries on the mobile device. The system dynamically performs type checking during the authoring, so the user receives immediate visual feedback in case of semantic error in the resulting query.We have deployed our system on several Android devices ranging from the 4” smart phones to 7” and 10” tablets. Our usability study shows that our query interface provides a significant improvement in the user experience when querying a relational data model. The system allows fast authoring speed of complex queries, and user friendly experience

HCI in the Wild Mêlée of Office Life:Explorations in Breaching the PC Data Store

‘HCI in the wild’ was meant to be a call to get HCI investigations out of the lab into the mêlée of real life. This is of course a commendable suggestion, though begs questions about what kinds of methods and topics are suited for exploring in this mêlée as against in the lab. Claims by some experimentalists that they seek ecological validity in lab studies are largely missing the point since the thing that studies in the wild seek are essentially only those things that occur outside the lab—and hence are not things that can be replicated, modelled, or emulated. But in any case, some of those who have taken up the call for studies in the wild have taken this rather too literally—they have sought wild places, places where HCI researchers have not gone before. Needless to say this being HCI, the places in question are not often that wild, woods near Brighton, for example, street life in south Cambridge. What they ignore as they venture into these settings is the mêlée of office life, the place where the bulk of computer systems are located and the place in which, oddly enough, increasingly little HCI research gets done

Exploring New Metaphors for a Networked World through the File Biography

We present a body of work undertaken in response to the challenge outlined by Harper et al. in their paper, ‘What is a File?’ [9]. As a reimagining of the file metaphor, we intro-duce the file biography, a digital entity that encompasses the provenance of a file and allows the user to keep track of how it propagates. First, we describe the design and con-ceptual work that grounded the file biography. We then report findings from two studies in which we (i) asked users to sketch out file biographies for their own content, and (ii) deployed a tool called Milestoner, which enables users to build their own file biographies across multiple versions of files. We conclude by drawing implications for new file metaphors and the actions they enable

Lightweight Tagging Expands Information and Activity Management Practices

Could people use tagging to manage day-to-day work in their personal computing environment? Could tagging be sufficiently generic and lightweight to support diverse ways of working and, perhaps, support new and efficient practices for managing applications and accessing documents? We investigate these issues by implementing the TAGtivity system that enables users to tag resources in the context of their ongoing work. We deployed TAGtivity and studied users’ tagging practices in their actual work places over a three week period. Our analysis of interviews and logs reveals that affordances of the TAGtivity system supported users in a variety of information and activity management tasks. These include new practices for managing emerging activities and ephemeral information and accessing documents across application data silos

A Novel, Tag-Based File-System

For decades, computer use has largely focused on managing and manipulating files-- creating and consuming media, browsing the web, software development, and even, with such systems as UNIX and Plan$9$, direct device access can largely be reduced to locating, creating, reading, and writing files. To facilitate these operations, developers have created a vast assortment of file-systems, each presenting a unique framework underlying nearly everything people do with a computer. For various reasons, these file-systems have historically represented only incremental improvements and alterations from their predecessors, leaving the basic design and interaction models relatively unchanged. Because of this, most common file-systems share a similar set of weaknesses and limitations, intrinsic to those models. As an attempt to break with these traditional shortcomings, the author has created STUFFS, a Semantically-Tagged Unstructured Future File-System. It is intended largely as a research platform for investigating fundamentally new ideas in storing, locating, managing, and otherwise manipulating files, their data, and their associated meta-data. As such, STUFFS does not claim to perfectly solve all of these problems -- rather, it serves as a proof-of-concept and testbed for a number of promising new approaches. Of these new features, users are likely most impacted by STUFFS\u27s titular tag-based structure, which spurns the traditional folder hierarchy in favor of a folksonomy inspired, tag-centric approach to file organization. While this change retains backwards compatibility, and is therefore fully usable as a traditional FS, it has profound impact on potential user interaction. In order to support this high level transition, STUFFS is implemented using a relational database for storage and tag-resolution, and, as an exciting side effect, it has gained proper transaction support and full ACID compliance