CHI Paper: It Feels Better Than Filing
Stephen Voida presented “It Feels Better than Filing: Everyday work experiences in an activity-based computing system”. ABC deprecates the folder hierarchy in favor of a mechanism for associating files (and other objects) with specific activities. The user specifies which activity they are undertaking, and the system materializes the items ssociated with that activity. Activity based computing is a interface model that is more reflective of how information work is actually thought about and carried out.
They built a system called Giornata (UIST 2008) that extends the desktop with ABC. It’s a generalization of virtual desktops, offering a virtual desktop PER TASK. But it’s more than just a virtual desktop—besides windows, it flips colleagues, files on the desktop, etc. It offers persistent display of tags associated with an activity. You can add whatever tags you like. Giornata applies the currently active tags to everything you touch now, and can also apply them to whatever you’ve touched in this activity in the past as well. Tags on activities are transfered to individual documents you are working with, so can use them as search terms. There are collaboration tools—listing of people and groups you associate with the activity. And activity-specific awareness tools—eg, how many unread emails you have from each of these relevant people. This tool was described at UIST 08.
They gave Giornata to 5 people (2 faculty, 2 grad students, one industrial designer); in CHI they report on its use over time. People used it for a couple of months, and reported ways it helped. Users averaged 7 activities with 28 activity switches/day. Very few activities ever got “closed”. One user kept many activities as a “todo list” but worked only on a few at a time. Others had few activities but one was a “hub” activity they switched back to often. There were an average of 1.8 tag words per activity. Almost all were set at activity creation—very few changes later. Project or event names. Many activities with no tags.
Subjects said it helped (vs typical virtual desktops) to explicitly bind specific activities. Storing on the desktop by activity instead of filing was the biggest win. Tagging was perceived as less important.
Unfortunately, with such a small sample they couldn’t get statistically significant results. But it is nonetheless thought provoking. I wish they’d explained why the subjects stopped using the tool after a while—I didn’t get a good sense of its limitations/drawbacks.