The demands of daily work offer few opportunities for workers to take stock of their own progress, big or small, which can lead to lower motivation, engagement, and higher risk of burnout. We present Highlight Matome, a personal online tool that encourages workers to quickly record and rank a single work highlight each day, helping them gain awareness of their own successes. We describe results from a field experiment investigating our tool's effectiveness for improving workers' engagement, perceptions, and affect. Thirty-three knowledge workers in Japan and the U.S. used Highlight Matome for six weeks. Our results show that using our tool for less than one minute each day significantly increased measures of work engagement, dedication, and positivity. A qualitative analysis of the highlights offers a window into participants' emotions and perceptions. We discuss implications for theories of inner work life and worker well-being.

Conversational agents stand to play an important role in supporting behavior change and well-being in many domains. With users able to interact with conversational agents through both text and voice, understanding how designing for these channels supports behavior change is important. To begin answering this question, we designed a conversational agent for the workplace that supports workers' activity journaling and self-learning through reflection. Our agent, named Robota, combines chat-based communication as a Slack Bot and voice interaction through a personal device using a custom Amazon Alexa Skill. Through a 3-week controlled deployment, we examine how voice-based and chat-based interaction affect workers' reflection and support self-learning. We demonstrate that, while many current technical limitations exist, adding dedicated mobile voice interaction separate from the already busy chat modality may further enable users to step back and reflect on their work. We conclude with discussion of the implications of our findings to design of workplace self-tracking systems specifically and to behavior-change systems in general.

Understanding team communication and collaboration patterns is critical for improving work efficiency in organizations. This paper presents an interactive visualization system, T-Cal, that supports the analysis of conversation data from modern team messaging platforms (e.g., Slack). T-Cal employs a user-familiar visual interface, a calendar, to enable seamless multi-scale browsing of data from different perspectives. T-Cal also incorporates a number of analytical techniques for disentangling interleaving conversations, extracting keywords, and estimating sentiment. The design of T-Cal is based on an iterative user-centered design process including interview studies, requirements gathering, initial prototypes demonstration, and evaluation with domain users. The resulting two case studies indicate the effectiveness and usefulness of T-Cal in real-world applications, including daily conversations within an industry research lab and student group chats in a MOOC.

Effective communication of activities and progress in the workplace is crucial for the success of many modern organizations. In this paper, we extend current research on workplace communication and uncover opportunities for technology to support effective work activity reporting. We report on three studies: With a survey of 68 knowledge workers followed by 14 in-depth interviews, we investigated the perceived benefits of different types of progress reports and an array of challenges at three stages: Collection, Composition, and Delivery. We show an important interplay between written and face-to-face reporting, and highlight the importance of tailoring a report to its audience. We then present results from an analysis of 722 reports composed by 361 U.S.-based knowledge workers, looking at the influence of the audience on a report's language. We conclude by discussing opportunities for future technologies to assist both employees and managers in collecting, interpreting, and reporting progress in the workplace.

Historically, people have interacted with companies and institutions through telephone-based dialogue systems and paper-based forms. Now, these interactions are rapidly moving to web- and phone-based chat systems. While converting traditional telephone dialogues to chat is relatively straightforward, converting forms to conversational interfaces can be challenging. In this work, we introduce methods and interfaces to enable the conversion of PDF and web-based documents that solicit user input into chat-based dialogues. Document data is first extracted to associate fields and their textual descriptions using metadata and lightweight visual analysis. The field labels, their spatial layout, and associated text are further analyzed to group related fields into natural conversational units. These correspond to questions presented to users in chat interfaces to solicit information needed to complete the original documents and downstream processes they support. This user supplied data can be inserted into the source documents and/or in downstream databases. User studies of our tool show that it streamlines form-to-chat conversion and produces conversational dialogues of at least the same quality as a purely manual approach.

In this paper, we describe DocHandles, a novel system that allows users to link to specific document parts in their chat applications. As users type a message, they can invoke the tool by referring to a specific part of a document, e.g., "@fig1 needs revision". By combining text parsing and document layout analysis, DocHandles can find and present all the figures "1" inside previously shared documents, allowing users to explicitly link to the relevant "document handle". In this way, Ddocuments become first-class citizens inside the conversation stream where users can seamlessly integrate documents in their text-centric messaging application.

It is increasingly possible to use cameras and sensors to detect and analyze human appearance for the purposes of personalizing user experiences. Such systems are already deployed in some public places to personalize advertisements and recommend items. However, since these technologies are not yet widespread, we do not have a good sense of users' perceptions of the benefits and drawbacks of public display systems that use face detection as an input for personalized recommendations. We conducted a user study with a system that inferred participants' gender and age from a facial detection and analysis algorithm and used this to present recommendations in two scenarios (finding stores to visit in a mall and finding a pair of sunglasses to buy). This work provides an initial step towards understanding user reactions to a new and emerging form of implicit recommendation based on physical appearance.

The negative effect of lapses during a behavior-change program has been shown to increase the risk of repeated lapses and, ultimately, program abandonment. In this paper, we examine the potential of system-driven lapse management -- supporting users through lapses as part of a behavior-change tool. We first review lessons from domains such as dieting and addiction research and discuss the design space of lapse management. We then explore the value of one approach to lapse management -- the use of "cheat points" -- as a way to encourage sustained participation. In an online study, we first examine interpretations of progress that was reached through using cheat points. We then present findings from a deployment of lapse management in a two-week field study with 30 participants. Our results demonstrate the potential of this approach to motivate and change users' behavior. We discuss important open questions for the design of future technology-mediated behavior change programs.

Distributed meetings can be messy, particularly when the task requires collaboration around multimedia artifacts. Teams must not only share a variety of materials related to the work in real time, but also need to refer back to information after a meeting ends. While video tools make it relatively easy to have conversations at a distance, they are less adept at sharing and archiving multimedia content. We conducted a survey of and interviews with members of distributed teams to investigate how they create, use, and share multimedia content before, during, and after distributed meetings. Our findings shed light on decisions made and rationales used in selecting technologies to prepare for, conduct, and archive the results of a video-mediated distributed meeting. The results suggest a need for flexible interfaces for information sharing in multiple meeting contexts so content can be both easily referred to in the moment and also found again later.

This paper presents a detailed examination of factors that affect perceptions of and attitudes towards multitasking in video conferencing. We first report findings from interviews with 15 professional users of videoconferencing. Our interviews revealed the roles and potential link of technology and activity. We then report results from a controlled online experiment with 397 participants based in the United States. Our results show that the technology used for multitasking has a significant effect on others' assumptions of what secondary activity the multitasker is likely engaged in, and that this assumed activity in turn affects evaluations of politeness and appropriateness. We also show that different layouts of the video conferencing UI can affect perception of engagement in the meeting and in turn ratings of polite or impolite behavior. We propose a conceptual model that captures our results and use the model to discuss implications for behavior and for the design of video communication tools.

The use of videoconferencing in the workplace has been steadily growing. While multitasking during video conferencing is often necessary, it is also viewed as impolite and sometimes unacceptable. One potential contributor to negative attitudes towards such multitasking is the disrupted sense of eye contact that occurs when an individual shifts their gaze away to another screen, for example, in a dual-monitor setup, common in office settings. We present an approach to improve a sense of eye contact over videoconferencing in dual-monitor setups. Our approach uses computer vision and desktop activity detection to dynamically choose the camera with the best view of a user's face. We describe two alternative implementations of our solution (RGB-only, and a combination of RGB and RGB-D cameras). We then describe results from an online experiment that shows the potential of our approach to significantly improve perceptions of a person's politeness and engagement in the meeting.

Most teleconferencing tools treat users in distributed meetings monolithically: all participants are meant to be interconnected in more-or-less the same manner. In practice, people connect to meetings in different contexts, sometimes sitting in front of a laptop or tablet giving their full attention, but at other times mobile and concurrently involved in other tasks or as a liminal participant in a larger group meeting. In this paper, we present the design and evaluation of two applications, MixMeetWear and MixMeetMate, to help users in non-standard contexts flexibly participate in meetings.

Websites can record individual users' activities and display them in a variety of ways. There is a tradeoff between detail and abstraction in visualization, especially when the amount of content increases and becomes more difficult to process. We conducted an experiment on Mechanical Turk varying the quality, detail, and visual presentation of information about an individual's past work to see how these design features affected perceptions of the worker. We found that providing detail in the display through text increased processing time and led to less positive evaluations. Visually abstract displays required less processing time but decreased confidence in evaluation. This suggests that different design parameters may engender differing psychological processes that influence reactions towards an unknown person.

In a variety of peer production settings, from Wikipedia to open source software development to crowdsourcing, individuals may encounter, edit, or review the work of unknown others. Typically this is done without much context to the person's past behavior or performance. To understand how exposure to an unknown individual's activity history influences attitudes and behaviors, we conducted an online experiment on Mechanical Turk varying the content, quality, and presentation of information about another Turker's work history. Surprisingly, negative work history did not lead to negative outcomes, but in contrast, a positive work history led to positive initial impressions that persisted in the face of contrary information. This work provides insight into the impact of activity history design factors on psychological and behavioral outcomes that can be of use in other related settings.

While synchronous meetings are an important part of collaboration, it is not always possible for all stakeholders to meet at the same time. We created the concept of hypermeetings for meetings with asynchronous attendance. Such hypermeetings consist of a chain of video-recorded meetings with hyperlinks for navigating through them. Our HyperMeeting system supports the viewing of prior meetings during a videoconference. Natural viewing behavior such as pausing video generates hyperlinks between previous and current meetings. During playback, automatic link-following guided by playback plans present the relevant content to users. Playback plans take into account the user's meeting attendance and viewing history and match them with features such as topic and speaker segmentation. A user study showed that participants found hyperlinks useful but did not always understand where the links would take them. Experiences from longer-term use and the study results provide a good basis for future system improvements.

Communities of practice have traditionally supported learning and knowledge exchange within a professional field. However, little work to date has examined how individuals use social network functionality for professional development in these types of communities. We present a qualitative investigation into how the social transparency provided by SNS functionality influences two important components of professional activity: social learning and professional identity development. We focus on activity within Dribbble, a social media enabled community of practice for graphic designers. Through a series of interviews with novice and experienced Dribbble users who work within and outside of traditional organizations, we identified ways they leverage social media features for learning and skill development. We find that benefits of the site are dependent on extensive social capital development activities in order to garner attention for posted work. Our results inform the design of online social settings for professional development.

Social networking tools now allow professionals to post and share their work in online spaces. These professionals build reputation within a community of practice, often with the goal of finding a job. But how are the visible traces of their actions and interactions in online workspaces used in the hiring process? We conducted interviews with members of the GitHub "social coding" community to understand how profiles on the site are used to assess people during recruitment and hiring for software development positions. Both employers and job seekers pointed to specific cues provided on profiles that led them to make inferences (or form impressions) about a candidate's technical skills, motivations, and values. These cues were seen as more reliable indicators of technical abilities and motivation than information provided on a resume, because of the transparency of work actions on GitHub and relative difficulty of manipulating behavior traces. The use of online workspaces like GitHub has implications for the type of information sought by employers as well as the activity traces job hunters might seek to leave.

In this paper we describe a qualitative investigation of impression formation in an online distributed software development community with social media functionality. We find that users in this setting seek out additional information about each other to explore the project space, inform future interactions, and understand the potential future value of a new person. They form impressions around other users' expertise based on history of activity across projects, and successful collaborations with key high status projects in the community. These impressions influence their receptivity to strangers' work contributions.

Time Travel Proxy (TTP) enables participating in meetings that you cannot attend in real time, either because of time conflicts or global time zone differences. TTP uses lightweight video recordings to pre-record your contributions to a meeting, which are played on a tablet that serves as a proxy for you during the meeting. Reactions and responses in the meeting are also captured in video to give you feedback of what happened at the meeting. A working prototype of TTP was deployed and studied within four developer teams in their daily stand-up meetings. The study found that the affordances of video helped integrate the time traveler into the social context of the meeting, although the current prototype was better at enabling the time traveler to contribute to the meeting than it was in conveying the meeting experience back to the time traveler.

In online collaborative communities such as open source software development, people often encounter unknown others who they must work with in the absence of any previous interaction or formal organizational relationship. These settings are increasingly supported by social networking systems. When connected with the work, these systems can provide detailed information about individuals' activities and behaviors. My research focuses on understanding how individuals form impressions of others in work environments supported by social media, and how these impressions influence collaborative outcomes.

In this research we examined the impact of photo sharing on attitudes and behaviors towards local versus distant team members. In an online experiment, we varied content and presentation of photos shared by a hypothetical team spanning two locations. We found similarity in shared photo content promoted pro-social behaviors towards team members regardless of location. We also found that the way the photos were organized moderated the impact of photo similarity, with diverging effects towards local versus distant team members. Our results indicate that photo sharing can promote positive behavior towards distant others under certain conditions. These results can inform the nature of photo sharing for team building.