Detecting and Correcting User Activity Switches: Algorithms and Interfaces

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Summary:
In this paper from Oregon State University’s School of EECS, authors Jianqing Shen, et al. present an updated version of an interface they had previously designed to detect and catalog switches in user activity, called TaskTracer.  TaskTracer applies machine learning methods to associate sets of resources with a particular user activity and make those resources more readily available to the user.  In this context, the term resources include documents, folders, email messages, contacts, and web pages.  TaskTracer configures the desktop in several ways to make these resources easy to get to: the task explorer presents a unified view of all resources associated with the current activity; the folder predictor modifies the Windows Open/Save dialogs by defaulting to folders associated with the current activity and adding shortcuts to them; the system has a time reporting feature that allows the user to show how much time was spent on each activity in a given period; finally, TaskTracer automatically tags incoming and outgoing emails associated with the activity.  The first version of TaskTracer had several problems including incorrect associations, unnecessary interruption of users with dialog boxes, and very slow learning algorithms.  TaskTracer2 fixes these issues by implementing an improved association engine, a desktop state estimator, a more intelligent switch detector, a notification controller that minimizes user interruption cost, and a clearer two-panel UI.

The researchers conducted a study on two people, a “power user” who recorded 4 months of data, and a second user who used the system for 6 days.  Overall, the participants found TaskTracer2 to rarely make an incorrect prediction, though it didn’t always make the exact correct one.

Discussion:
I think the user study for this application speaks the most clearly in regards to how I feel about TaskTracer: the “power user” found it very useful and accurate and was even described by the researchers as “fairly careful about declaring switches.”  I think associating resources with particular tasks is a great idea (like a more powerful, dynamic version of Windows’ “Recent Documents” feature), but having to explicitly declare when I’m switching activities would annoy me very quickly, especially if the system started pestering me about it with dialog boxes.  I think TaskTracer is best suited to the sort of conscientious power users that the researchers studied; the average user probably wouldn’t reap enough benefit for all the explicit task-switch declaration to be worth it.