We developed DataBoard, a freeform spatial interface, to support users in simple problem solving tasks. To develop a deeper understanding of the role of space and the tradeoffs between freeform and structured interaction styles in problem solving tasks, we conducted a controlled user study comparing the DataBoard with a spreadsheet and analyzed video data in detail. Beyond improvements in task performance and memory recall, our observations reveal that freeform interfaces can support users in a variety of ways: representing problems flexibly, developing strategies, executing strategies incrementally, tracking problem state easily, reducing mental computation, and verifying solutions perceptually. The spreadsheet also had advantages, and we discuss the tradeoffs.

The success of social computing has generated a host of workplace collaboration tools. However, adoption of these tools by entire groups is a major problem. One reason for the adoption problem is a lack of methods for considering collaborative groups in technology design. Even when designing collaboration tools, designers often employ methods that focus on individuals. This leads to tools that are not well targeted at the groups who will use them. To solve this problem, we propose the notion of collaboration personas, which are empirically derived descriptions of hypothetical groups, including details that inform the design of collaboration tools. Collaboration personas differ from individual personas in having (1) multiple, inter-related individuals playing specific roles; (2) a focus on collective goals and elaboration of individual goals that affect the collective goal; and (3) new attributes that characterize collaborative aspects of the group's work. We contrast collaboration personas with other design approaches and provide examples of how they can be used to design new collaborative tools that better meet the needs of typical groups.

In this paper we feature a set of research projects done at several IBM Research laboratories across the world. The work featured here focuses on the topic of smart social collaboration, which studies, designs, and develops social collaboration principles and technologies that can help customize and enhance existing social collaboration tools to suit specific user needs, including cultural, business, and personal needs.

Knowledge workers expend considerable effort managing fragmentation, characterized by constant switching among digital artifacts, when executing work activities. Activity-centric computing (ACC) systems attempt to address this problem by organizing activity-related artifacts together. But are ACC systems effective at reducing fragmentation? In this paper, we present a two-part study of workers using Lotus Activities, an ACC system deployed for over two years in a large company. First, we surveyed workers to understand the ecology of workplace tools they use for various tasks. Second, we interviewed 22 Lotus Activities users to investigate how this ACC tool fits amongst their ecology of existing collaboration tools and affects work fragmentation. Our results indicate that Lotus Activities works in concert with certain other tools to successfully ease fragmentation for a specific type of activity. We identify design characteristics that contribute to this result.

This paper reports on three ethnographic studies of how people coordinate their activities in various work settings. The findings reported here are a derived set of relationships reflecting the nature of involvement of people in their activities. These findings were then tested by six analysts, who were conducting field studies of patterns of complex business activities. They used the derived relationships in the analysis of their data and in the representation of activity patterns. These usage cases revealed confusion between involvement relationships and job roles. Finally, several implications of these studies for designing an activity management prototype are presented.

Ordinary paper offers properties of readability, fluidity, flexibility, cost, and portability that current electronic devices are often hard pressed to match. In fact, a lofty goal for many interactive systems is to be "as easy to use as pencil and paper". However, the static nature of paper does not support a number of capabilities, such as search and hyperlinking that an electronic device can provide. The Paper PDA project explores ways in which hybrid paper electronic interfaces can bring some of the capabilities of the electronic medium to interactions occurring on real paper. Key to this effort is the invention of on-paper interaction techniques which retain the flexibility and fluidity of normal pen and paper, but which are structured enough to allow robust interpretation and processing in the digital world. This paper considers the design of a class of simple printed templates that allow users to make common marks in a fluid fashion, and allow additional gestures to be invented by the users to meet their needs, but at the same time encourages marks that are quite easy to recognize.

Pervasive Computing is a term for the strongly emerging trend toward: --Numerous, casually accessible, often invisible computing devices. --Frequently mobile or embedded in the environment. --Connected to an increasingly ubiquitous network infrastructure composed of a wired core and wireless edges.

A Collaborage is a collaborative collage of physically represented information on a surface that is connected with electronic information, such as a physical In/Out board connected to a people-locator database. The physical surface (board) contains items that are tracked by camera and computer vision technology. Events on the board trigger electronic services. This paper motivates this concept, presents three different applications, describes the system architecture and component technologies, and discusses several design issues.

Our god is to pro~ide took to support wortig meetings On an electronic w'hitebom& c~ed TivoE This paper describes how we have inte~akd strucmd "dofi obj~~"into the whitebonrd environrnen~Domain objects represent the subject matter of meedngs and can be exchanged between Tivofi and group databases.Domain objects can be tailored to produce m=ting tools that ~e fiely tuned to mmting practims.We destibe the fac~ty for tiering and mana=tig domain objects and tie user intetiace techniques for blending these into tie whiteboard environrnen~We show examples of both spmtic and generic meeting took crafted horn domain objects, and we describe a long-term we study in m'%chthese took support an ongoing work process.

Our goal is to provide tools to support working meetings on an electronic whiteboard, called Tivoli.This paper describes how we have integrated structured domain objects, which represent the subject matter of meetings, into the freeform whiteboard environment.Domain objects can be tailored to produce meeting tools that are finely tuned to meeting practices.We describe the language for defining domain objects and show examples of meeting tools that have been built with the language.We show that the system can interpret the spatial relationships of domain objects on the whiteboard to encode the meanings of the spatial arrangements, and we describe the computational mechanisms.We discuss some of the design principles for tailoring gestures for domain objects.Finally, we enumerate the techniques we have used to integrate the structured objects into the freeform whiteboard environment.

An interesting dialogue about the issues raised by Gray and Salzman surfaced in the first round of reviews, and it occurred to us that this dialogue could be of value to the readers of Human–Computer Interaction. We invited a number of people in the field to submit commentaries on the article. These were reviewed and revised, with all commentators seeing each others’ comments, as well as Gray and Salzman’s final article.

Article "I'll get that off the audio": a case study of salvaging multimedia meeting records Share on Authors: Thomas P. Moran Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Leysia Palen Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CA Department of Information and Computer Science, University of California, Irvine, CAView Profile , Steve Harrison Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Patrick Chiu Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Don Kimber Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Scott Minneman Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , William van Melle Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Polle Zellweger Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '97: Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conference on Human factors in computing systemsMarch 1997 Pages 202–209https://doi.org/10.1145/258549.258704Online:27 March 1997Publication History 89citation868DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations89Total Downloads868Last 12 Months22Last 6 weeks0 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

This paper presents a scheme for extending an informal, penbased whiteboard system (the Tivoli application on-the Xerox LiveBoard) to provide interaction techniques that enable groups of users in informal meetings to easily organize and.rearrange material and to manage the space on the board.The techniques are based on the direct manipulation of boundaries and the implicit recognition of regions.The techniques include operations for shrinking and rearranging, structured borders that tessellate the board, freeform enclosures that can be split, fused, and linked, and collapsible annotations.Experience with using these techniques, the results of a user test, some design trade-offs and lessons, and future directions are discussed.

Article Evolutionary engagement in an ongoing collaborative work process: a case study Share on Authors: Thomas P. Moran Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Patrick Chiu Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Steve Harrison Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Gordon Kurtenbach Alias Research, 110 Richmond, Street East, Toronto, Canada M5C 1P1 and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Alias Research, 110 Richmond, Street East, Toronto, Canada M5C 1P1 and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Scott Minneman Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , William van Melle Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CSCW '96: Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative workNovember 1996 Pages 150–159https://doi.org/10.1145/240080.240243Published:16 November 1996 40citation654DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations40Total Downloads654Last 12 Months11Last 6 weeks1 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteGet Access

Article Free Access Share on Implicit structure for pen-based systems within a freeform interaction paradigm Authors: Thomas P. Moran Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Patrick Chiu Live Works, Inc., A Xerox Company, 2040 Fortune Drive, San Jose, CA and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Live Works, Inc., A Xerox Company, 2040 Fortune Drive, San Jose, CA and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , William van Melle Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile , Gordon Kurtenbach Alias Research Inc., 110 Richmond Street East, Toronto, Canada M5C 1P1 and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CA Alias Research Inc., 110 Richmond Street East, Toronto, Canada M5C 1P1 and Xerox Palo Alto Research Center, 3333 Coyote Hill Road, Palo Alto, CAView Profile Authors Info & Claims CHI '95: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsMay 1995 Pages 487–494https://doi.org/10.1145/223904.223970Published:01 May 1995Publication History 51citation715DownloadsMetricsTotal Citations51Total Downloads715Last 12 Months44Last 6 weeks7 Get Citation AlertsNew Citation Alert added!This alert has been successfully added and will be sent to:You will be notified whenever a record that you have chosen has been cited.To manage your alert preferences, click on the button below.Manage my AlertsNew Citation Alert!Please log in to your account Save to BinderSave to BinderCreate a New BinderNameCancelCreateExport CitationPublisher SiteView all FormatsPDF

Many interfaces allow users to manipulate graphical objects, icons representing underlying data or the data themselves, against a spatial backdrop or canvas. Users take advantage of the flexibility offered by spatial manipulation to create evolving lightweight structures. We have been investigating these implicit organizations so we can support user activities like information management or exploratory analysis. To accomplish this goal, we have analyzed the spatial structures people create in diverse settings and tasks, developed algorithms to detect the common structures we identified in our survey, and experimented with new facilities based on recognized structure. Similar recognitionbased functionality can be used within many common applications, providing more support for users ’ activities with less attendant overhead.

The paper shows how techniques from computational vision can be deployed to support interactive sketch editing. While conventional computer supported drawing tools give users access to visible marks or image objects at a single level of abstraction, a human user's visual system rapidly constructs complex groupings and associations among image elements according to his or her immediate purposes. We have been exploring perceptually supported sketch editors in which computer vision algorithms run continuously, behind the scenes, to afford users efficient access to emergent visual objects in a drawing. We employ a flexible image interpretation architecture based on token grouping in a multiscale blackboard data structure. This organization supports multiple perceptual interpretations of line drawing data, domain specific knowledge bases for interpreting visual structures, and natural gesture based selection of visual objects.>

No abstract available.

The human visual system makes a great deal more of images than the elemental marks on a surface. In the course of viewing, creating, or editing a picture, we actively construct a host of visual structures and relationships as components of sensible interpretations. This paper shows how some of these computational processes can be incorporated into perceptually-supported image editing tools, enabling machines to better engage users at the level of their own percepts. We focus on the domain of freehand sketch editors, such as an electronic whiteboard application for a pen-based computer. By using computer vision techniques to perform covert recognition of visual structure as it emerges during the course of a drawing/editing session, a perceptually supported image editor gives users access to visual objects as they are perceived by the human visual system. We present a flexible image interpretation architecture based on token grouping in a multiscale blackboard data structure. This organization supports multiple perceptual interpretations of line drawing data, domain-specific knowledge bases for interpretable visual structures, and gesture-based selection of visual objects. A system implementing these ideas, called PerSketch, begins to explore a new space of WYPIWYG (What You Perceive Is What You Get) image editing tools.

Abstract Drawing a mark can be an efficient command input technique when using a pen‐based computer. However, marks are not intrinsically self‐explanatory as are other interactive techniques such as buttons and menus. We present design principles for interaction mechanisms which make marks self explanatory for novices but still allow experts to use efficient command marks. The key notion is that use of the explanation mechanism physically trains a novice to use the efficient command marks. Two novel interaction mechanisms we have developed using these principles are presented.

At EuroPARC, we have been exploring ways to allow physically separated colleagues to work together effectively and naturally. In this paper, we briefly discuss several examples of our work in the context of three themes that have emerged: the need to support the full range of shared work; the desire to ensure privacy without giving up unobtrusive awareness; and the possibility of creating systems which blur the boundaries between people, technologies and the everyday world.

It is impossible to design systems which are appropriate for all users and all situations. We believe that a useful technique is to have end users tailor their systems to match their personal work practices. This requires not only systems which can be tailored, but a culture within which users feel in control of the system and in which tailoring is the norm. In a two-pronged research project we have worked closely with a group of users to develop a system to support tailoring and to help the users evolve a “tailoring culture”. This has resulted in a flexible system based around the use of distributed on-screen Buttons to support a range of tailoring techniques.

EuroPARC is developing an integrated multi-media environment as an integral part of its formal and informal working environment. From our initial experiences with this kind of technology, we and our colleagues believe that it exhibits several qualitatively different properties, which seem to call into question many of our ideas about what computer systems are and how people relate to them. This has caused us to step back and take stock of the design principles we are using and, more generally, to ask what are appropriate principles for CSCW applications and technologies.

We assert that the product of user interface design should be not only the interface itself but also a rationale for why the interface is the way it is. We describe a representation for design based around a semi-formal notation which allows us explicitly to represent alternative design options and reasons for choosing among them. We illustrate the approach with examples from an analysis of scrolling mechanisms. We discuss the roles we expect such a representation to play in improving the coherence of designs and in communicating reasons for choices to others, whether designers, maintainers, collaborators or end users.

EuroPARC is a systems research laboratory supported by Rank Xerox Limited and allied with the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center (PARC). The decision to create EuroPARC was announced in November of 1986, and the lab was officially dedicated in June of 1988. EuroPARC's research charter is human-computer interaction. The research program is coordinated with PARC's, but the goal is to combine PARC-style systems research with European points of view, issues, and approaches.

NoteCards is an extensible environment designed to help people formulate, structure, compare, and manage ideas. NoteCards provides the user with a “semantic network” of electronic notecards interconnected by typed links. The system provides tools to organize, manage, and display the structure of the network, as well as a set of methods and protocols for creating programs to manipulate the information in the network. NoteCards is currently being used by more than 50 people engaged in idea processing tasks ranging from writing research papers through designing parts for photocopiers.

Human factors psychologists contribute in many ways to improving human-computer interaction. One contribution involves evaluating existing or prototype systems, in order to assess usability and identify problems. Another involves contributing more directly to the design of systems in the first place: that is, not only evaluating systems but bringing to bear empirical methods and theoretical considerations that help specify what are plausible designs in the first place. The goal of this panel is to discuss four case studies emphasizing this role of cognitive human factors, and identify relevant methods and theoretical considerations.

This paper presents a cognitive model for one aspect of how novices learn text editors—the acquisition of procedural skill by problem solving in problem spaces and the use of analogy for building a representation of the semantics of text-editor commands (which we call operators). Protocol data of computer-naive subjects learning the EMACS text editor suggests that they use their knowledge of typewriting to decide which commands to use in performing editing tasks. We propose a formal method of analysis that compares operators in two problem spaces and generates misconceptions. The comparison of these predicted misconceptions with verbal comments, error data, and task difficulty lends support to this analysis.

It has often been suggested that users understand and reason about complex systems on the basis of a mental model of the system's internal mechanics. This paper describes an empirical study of how mental model knowledge is used in operating a stack calculator. One group of naive users were taught step-by-step procedures for solving typical problems on the calculator. A second group of naive users were taught the same procedures in conjunction with an explicit model of the calculator's stack mechanism. The users then solved problems on the calculator while thinking aloud. Analysis of the performance of these two groups indicates that the model had little effect in routine problem solving situations, but significantly improved performance for novel problems. Analyses of the think-aloud protocols indicate that the users employed five distinct modes of problem solving: skilled methods, problem reduction strategies, a conversion algorithm, model-based problem space search, and methods-based problem space search. Skilled methods, problem reduction strategies and the conversion algorithm were used for solving more routine problems and did not necessarily depend on mental model knowledge. Problem space search was used in the novel problems. For the model users, the states and operations of the stack mechanism served as the problem space to be searched for a problem solution. In contrast, the no-model users employed a less effective search strategy based on the recombination of pieces of known procedures. These results indicate that explicitly teaching naive users an appropriate mental model of a system can provide a psychologically effective and robust basis for operating the machine.

A task analysis technique, called ETIT analysis, is introduced. It is based on the idea that tasks in the external world must be reformulated into the internal concepts of a computer system before the system can be used. The analysis is in the form of a mapping between sets of external tasks and internal tasks. An example analysis of several text editing systems is presented, and various properties of the systems are derived from the analysis. Further, it is shown how this analysis can be used to assess the potential transfer of knowledge from one system to another, i.e., how much knowing one system helps with learning another. Several issues are briefly discussed.

How can learning in text-editing be characterized? Much recent work has focused on the use of analogies from prior experience. In this paper, we investigate the retrievals of earlier experiences within the editor and how they might be used by analogy to accomplish the task and learn the editor. An experiment is presented that demonstrates the effects of these “remindings” on performance. In addition, some possible determinants of these remindings are investigated. This experiment points out the need to consider not only the general form of instruction, but also the specifics of the instructional sequence as well. Irrelevant aspects of the task may have strong effects on performance. We consider three teaching techniques, designed to take advantage of these effects in different ways.

Natural language would seem to have a strong effect on users' behavior with artificial command languages for interacting with computer systems.

The computer is like a typewriter. The computer is like a filing cabinet. The computer is a personal servant ready to obey your every command.

This paper describes a graduate seminar given by the authors at Stanford University in the Department of Psychology in the Spring of 1980. Although the seminar was also listed as a Computer Science course and was attended by students and faculty from Computer Science and other departments, the course was addressed to Ph.D. students in cognitive psychology. The seminar assumed that the students were familiar with modern cognitive psychology, but did not assume that they necessarily had much experience with interactive computing.

This paper presents a methodology for evaluating computer text editors from the viewpoint of their users—from novices learning the editor to dedicated experts who have mastered the editor. The dimensions which this methodology addresses are:—Time to perform edit tasks by experts.—Errors made by experts.—Learning of basic edit tasks by novices.—Functionality over all possible edit tasks.The methodology is objective and thorough, yet easy to use. The criterion of objectivity implies that the evaluation scheme not be biased in favor of any particular editor's conceptual model—its way of representing text and operations on the text. In addition, data is gathered by observing people who are equally familiar with each system. Thoroughness implies that several different aspects of editor usage be considered. Ease-of-use means that methodology is usable by editor designers, managers of word processing centers, or other non-psychologists who need this kind of information, but have limited time and equipment resources.In this paper, we explain the methodology first, then give some interesting empirical results from applying it to several editors.