Co-authoring with structured annotations

Most co-authoring tools support basic annotations, such as edits and comments that are anchored at specific locations in the document. However, they do not support metacommentary about a document (such as an author’s summary of modifications) which gets separated from the document, often in the body of email messages. This causes unnecessary overhead in the write-review-edit workflow inherent in co-authoring. We present document-embedded structured annotations called “bundles ” that incorporate the meta-commentary into a unified annotation model that meets a set of annotation requirements we identified through a small field investigation. A usability study with 20 subjects evaluated the annotation reviewing stage of coauthoring and showed that annotation bundles in our highfidelity prototype reduced reviewing time and increased accuracy, compared to a system that only supports edits and comments. Author Keywords Collaborative writing, collaborative authoring, structure

Feeling Stressed and Unproductive? A Field Evaluation of a Therapy-Inspired Digital Intervention for Knowledge Workers

Today’s knowledge workers face cognitively demanding tasks and blurred work-life boundaries amidst rising stress and burnout in the workplace. Holistic approaches to supporting workers, which consider both productivity and well-being, are increasingly important. Taking this holistic approach, we designed an intervention inspired by cognitive behavioral therapy that consists of: (1) using the term “Time Well Spent” (TWS) in place of “productivity”, (2) a mobile self-logging tool for logging activities, feelings, and thoughts at work, and (3) a visualization that guides users to reflect on their data. We ran a 4-week exploratory qualitative comparison in the field with 24 graduate students to examine our Therapy-inspired intervention alongside a classic Baseline intervention. Participants who used our intervention often shifted toward a holistic perspective of their primary working hours, which included an increased consideration of breaks and emotions. No such change was seen by those who used the Baseline intervention

The Next Generation of Human-Drone Partnerships: Co-Designing an Emergency Response System

The use of semi-autonomous Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAV) to support emergency response scenarios, such as fire surveillance and search and rescue, offers the potential for huge societal benefits. However, designing an effective solution in this complex domain represents a "wicked design" problem, requiring a careful balance between trade-offs associated with drone autonomy versus human control, mission functionality versus safety, and the diverse needs of different stakeholders. This paper focuses on designing for situational awareness (SA) using a scenario-driven, participatory design process. We developed SA cards describing six common design-problems, known as SA demons, and three new demons of importance to our domain. We then used these SA cards to equip domain experts with SA knowledge so that they could more fully engage in the design process. We designed a potentially reusable solution for achieving SA in multi-stakeholder, multi-UAV, emergency response applications.Comment: 10 Pages, 5 Figures, 2 Tables. This article is publishing in CHI202

Are We All In the Same "Bloat"?

Bloat", a term that has existed in the technical community for many years, has recently received attention in the popular press. The term has a negative connotation implying that human, or system performance is diminished in some way when "bloat" exists. Yet "bloat" is seldom clearly defined and is often a catch-all phrase to suggest that software is filled with unnecessary features. However, to date there are no studies that explore how users actually experience complex functionality-filled software applications and most importantly, the extent to which they experience them in similar/different ways. The significance of understanding users' experience is in the implications this understanding has for design. Using both quantitative and qualitative methods, we carried out a study to gain a better understanding of the experiences of 53 members of the general population who use a popular word processor, Microsoft Word, Office 97. As a result we are able to further specify the term "bloat", distinguishing an objective and subjective dimension. It is the discovery of the subjective dimension that opens the design space and raises new challenges for interface designers. There is certainly more to "bloat" than meets the eye