Systems for Managing Work-Related Transitions

Peoples' work lives have become ever-populated with transitions across tasks, devices, and environments. Despite their ubiquitous nature, managing transitions across these three domains has remained a significant challenge. Current systems and interfaces for managing transitions have explored approaches that allow users to track work-related information or automatically capture or infer context, but do little to support user autonomy at its fullest. In this dissertation, we present three studies that support the goal of designing and understanding systems for managing work-related transitions. Our inquiry is motivated by the notion that people lack the ability to continue or discontinue their work at the level they wish to do so. We scope our research to information work settings, and we use our three studies to generate novel insights about how empowering peoples' ability to engage with their work can mitigate the challenges of managing work-related transitions. We first introduce and study Mercury, a system that mitigates programmers' challenges in transitioning across devices and environments by enabling their ability to continue work on-the-go. Mercury orchestrates programmers' work practices by providing them with a series of auto-generated microtasks on their mobile device based on the current state of their source code. Tasks in Mercury are designed so that they can be completed quickly without the need for additional context, making them suitable to address during brief moments of downtime. When users complete microtasks on-the-go, Mercury calculates file changes and integrates them into the user's codebase to support task resumption. We then introduce SwitchBot, a conversational system that mitigates the challenges in discontinuing work during the transition between home and the workplace. SwitchBot's design philosophy is centered on assisting information workers in detaching from and reattaching with their work through brief conversations before the start and end of the workday. By design, SwitchBot's detachment and reattachment dialogues inquire about users' task-related goals or user's emotion-related goals. We evaluated SwitchBot with an emphasis on understanding how the system and its two dialogues uniquely affected information workers' ability to detach from and later reattach with their work. Following our study of Mercury and SwitchBot, we present findings from an interview study with crowdworkers aimed at understanding the work-related transitions they experience in their work practice from the perspective of tools. We characterize the tooling observed in crowdworkers' work practices and identified three types of "fragmentation" that are motivated by tooling in the practice. Our study highlights several distinctions between traditional and contemporary information work settings and lays a foundation for future systems that aid next-generation information workers in managing work-related transitions. We conclude by outlining this dissertation's contributions and future research directions

Understanding Questions that Arise When Working with Business Documents

While digital assistants are increasingly used to help with various productivity tasks, less attention has been paid to employing them in the domain of business documents. To build an agent that can handle users' information needs in this domain, we must first understand the types of assistance that users desire when working on their documents. In this work, we present results from two user studies that characterize the information needs and queries of authors, reviewers, and readers of business documents. In the first study, we used experience sampling to collect users' questions in-situ as they were working with their documents, and in the second, we built a human-in-the-loop document Q&A system which rendered assistance with a variety of users' questions. Our results have implications for the design of document assistants that complement AI with human intelligence including whether particular skillsets or roles within the document are needed from human respondents, as well as the challenges around such systems.Comment: This paper will appear in CSCW'2

The New Normals of Work: a framework for understanding responses to disruptions created by new futures of work

The COVID-19 pandemic led to governments advising citizens to engage in ’social distancing’ measures. These measures included working from home rather than in an office. As a result, many people had to rapidly develop new working strategies. As we look to a new future of work, with many workplaces examining long-term remote or hybrid working set-ups, it is important to understand how people developed remote working strategies and the contextual factors that precluded workers from maximising the potential of technology. Using a two-stage approach including a qualitative survey and a series of in-depth interviews, we investigated the challenges people experienced in creating effective workspaces, getting work done and connecting with others that surfaced during the COVID-19 crisis. We adapt a framework used in healthcare to the work context to make sense of how people cope with this disruption to find a new normal. From this, we identify instances of how people adapt to the new normal, where they avoid adaption and where they anticipate future changes. This gives us an understanding of how people adapt to the changing nature of work in response to the pandemic and offers a lens that may help to understand other future disruptions to work

AI and the Writer: How Language Models Support Creative Writers

Writing underlies a vast landscape of cultural artifacts, from poetry to journalism to scientific papers. While technology has been used to reduce the cognitive load of writing with accurate next word prediction, recent developments in natural language generation may prove able to go beyond predicting what we were going to write anyway, and give us new ideas relevant to a particular writing task. This proposal, of computers giving writers valuable ideas, is quite new in the history of writing tools, and has so far proven illusory. Existing systems that address story continuation, which present writers with options for the next sentence in their story, has continually found that suggested sentences are nonsensical, inconsistent with what's already written, or a deviation from the writer's intended direction. Thus, it's not understood if---and if so, how---generative language technologies can support writers with complex writing tasks. I address this challenge by focusing on more specific goals than story continuation, and demonstrate that the methods I develop generate coherent, cogent suggestions that writers are able to use in a variety of settings and writing tasks. In this thesis, I consider writing tasks that are constrained by some external expectation, such as the logic of a metaphor or the details of a technical topic, but also require creativity to write a sentence or paragraph that is novel, surprising, and engaging to read. I introduce a design space, based on the cognitive process model of writing, that reveals how constrained, creative writing tasks are not supported by current writing support tools. I then present methods, embedded in systems, to support two challenging constrained, creative writing tasks. With `Metaphoria', I present a method to aid in metaphor writing by generating metaphorical connections between two concepts. With `Sparks', I present a method to aid in science writing by generating sentences that make a connection between a technical topic and typical reader interests. These systems demonstrate that computation has the power to support constrained, creative tasks, and outline how they aid in inspiration, translation, and perspective. Finally, through a qualitative study with a range of creative writers, I uncover the social dynamics that modulate how writers respond to such generative writing support. Collectively, this work demonstrates new methods for using technology to support creative writers, and presents theoretical results that describe both how and why writers make use of such technologies

Understanding the impacts of gig economy platforms on freelancers’ work practices

Freelancing platforms have enabled opportunities for millions of knowledge workers worldwide to pursue a freelance career. Freelancing platforms are part of an emerging work model characterised by technology companies mediating work relationships through algorithms that manage, monitor, and evaluate work – the gig economy. Previous literature has studied freelance workers’ practices, for instance, how they go about getting work, cultivating their reputation, and managing their work. However, most of this research has been conducted prior to the emergence of freelancing platforms, leaving a gap in our understanding of how platforms impact freelancers’ work. This thesis comprises of three qualitative studies, engaging with views from a total of 476 freelancers, to understand the opportunities and challenges freelancing platforms introduce for their work practices. The first study explores how freelancers view online freelancing platforms through a qualitative analysis of discussions in four freelancing subforums. The findings suggests that platforms can enable opportunities to source clients, gain experience, and mitigate precarity while constraining control over their work choices, reputation, and client relationships. The second study focuses on understanding the impact of platforms on freelancers’ everyday work-life through a qualitative diary study followed by semi-structured interviews. Findings from this study illustrate how platform features and individual circumstances shape freelancers’ everyday life. Importantly platform features introduce new constraints on work availability, autonomy, and detachment. The last study builds from the previous two studies and literature recommendations to develop a design fiction that explored a model of online freelancing where platform features are designed to support (rather than constrain) freelancers’ work preferences. This design fiction is used as the basis for five focus groups, identifying novel areas for research and development to support freelancers’ autonomy, entrepreneurship, and peer support. This thesis makes contributions to knowledge, design, and policy. Firstly, it contributes novel empirical knowledge to the impacts freelancing platforms have had on freelance work by unpacking core challenges and opportunities. Secondly, it contributes design implications that move towards thinking about ‘worker-centred’ research interventions, platform configurations, and features to mitigate challenges stemming from platforms. Thirdly, it contributes policy implications to regulate and hold platforms accountable, rethink social institutions to better support freelancers, and legislate emerging technologies that manage work