Group and individual time management tools: what you get is not what you need

Some studies of diaries and scheduling systems have considered how individuals use diaries with a view to proposing requirements for computerised time management tools. Others have focused on the criteria for success of group scheduling systems. Few have paid attention to how people use a battery of tools as an ensemble. This interview study reports how users exploit paper, personal digital assistants (PDAs) and a group scheduling system for their time management. As with earlier studies, we find many shortcomings of different technologies, but studying the ensemble rather than individual tools points towards a different conclusion: rather than aiming towards producing electronic time management tools that replace existing paper-based tools, we should be aiming to understand the relative strengths and weaknesses of each technology and look towards more seamless integration between tools. In particular, the requirements for scheduling and those for more responsive, fluid time management conflict in ways that demand different kinds of support

Methodological development

Book description: Human-Computer Interaction draws on the fields of computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and organisational and social sciences in order to understand how people use and experience interactive technology. Until now, researchers have been forced to return to the individual subjects to learn about research methods and how to adapt them to the particular challenges of HCI. This is the first book to provide a single resource through which a range of commonly used research methods in HCI are introduced. Chapters are authored by internationally leading HCI researchers who use examples from their own work to illustrate how the methods apply in an HCI context. Each chapter also contains key references to help researchers find out more about each method as it has been used in HCI. Topics covered include experimental design, use of eyetracking, qualitative research methods, cognitive modelling, how to develop new methodologies and writing up your research

Knowledge Cartography for Controversies: The Iraq Debate

In analysing controversies and debates—which would include reviewing a literature in order to plan research, or assessing intelligence to formulate policy—there is no one worldview which can be mapped, for instance as a single, coherent concept map. The cartographic challenge is to show which facts are agreed and contested, and the different kinds of narrative links that use facts as evidence to define the nature of the problem, what to do about it, and why. We will use the debate around the invasion of Iraq to demonstrate the methodology of using a knowledge mapping tool to extract key ideas from source materials, in order to classify and connect them within and across a set of perspectives of interest to the analyst. We reflect on the value that this approach adds, and how it relates to other argument mapping approaches

Query-Based Document Skimming: A User-Centred Evaluation of Relevance Profiling

We present a user-centred, task-oriented, comparative evaluation of two query-based document skimming tools. ProfileSkim bases within-document retrieval on computing a relevance profile for a document and query; FindSkim provides similar functionality to the web browser Find-command. A novel simulated work task was devised, where experiment participants are asked to identify (index) relevant pages of an electronic book, given subjects from the existing book index. This subject index provides the ground truth, against which the indexing results can be compared. Our major hypothesis was confirmed, namely ProfileSkim proved significantly more efficient than Find-Skim, as measured by time for task. Moreover, indexing task effectiveness, measured by typical IR measures, demonstrated that ProfileSkim was better than FindSkim in identifying relevant pages, although not significantly so. The experiments confirm the potential of relevance profiling to improve query-based document skimming, which should prove highly beneficial for users trying to identify relevant information within long documents

The Case for Message Passing on Many-Core Chips

Coordinated Science Laboratory was formerly known as Control Systems LaboratoryUILU-ENG-10-2203, CRHC-10-0

Formalising an understanding of user–system misfits

Many of the difficulties users experience when working with interactive systems arise from misfits between the user’s conceptualisation of the domain and device with which they are working and the conceptualisation implemented within those systems. We report an analytical technique called CASSM (Concept-based Analysis for Surface and Structural Misfits) in which such misfits can be formally represented to assist in understanding, describing and reasoning about them. CASSM draws on the framework of Cognitive Dimensions (CDs) in which many types of misfit were classified and presented descriptively, with illustrative examples. CASSM allows precise definitions of many of the CDs, expressed in terms of entities, attributes, actions and relationships. These definitions have been implemented in Cassata, a tool for automated analysis of misfits, which we introduce and describe in some detail

When Visual Programs are Harder to Read than Textual Programs

Claims for the virtues of visual programming languages have generally been strong, simple-minded statements that visual programs are inherently better than textual ones. They have paid scant attention to previous empirical literature showing difficulties in comprehending visual programs. This paper reports comparisons between the comprehensibility of textual and visual programs, drawing on the methods developed by Green (1977) for comparing detailed comprehensibility of conditional structures. The visual language studied was LabView, a circuit-diagram-like language which can express conditionals either as `forwards' structures (condition implies action, with nesting) or as `backwards' structures (action is governed by conditions, with boolean operators in place of nesting). Green (1977) found that forwards structures gave relatively better access to `sequential' information, and Gilmore and Green (1984) showed `backwards' structures gave relatively better access to `circumstantial' inf..