Legacy web tools attempt to build on information that uses have when they originally conduct web research. In contrast, we examine the information that they have at the time when they attempt to recreate their past. We interviewed 11 non-expert users twice a week for eight weeks in their own physical and computational environments. We used both Google web histories and the prototype Research Trails system as prompts to probe how the participants viewed their past web experiences and how they reconstructed them. The Research Trails system lets users utilize information about both time and topic to help themselves remember and resume everyday research tasks. Based on these observations, a model of users' perceived past web activities informed the iterative refinement of the Research Trails system. The user may see a past action as belonging to multiple categories at the same time or as in different categories at different times.

Online news reading has become very popular as the web provides access to news articles from millions of sources around the world. A key challenge of news websites is to help users find the articles that are interesting to read. In this paper, we present our research on developing personalized news recommendation system in Google News. For users who are logged in and have explicitly enabled web history, the recommendation system builds profiles of users' news interests based on their past click behavior. To understand how users' news interests change over time, we first conducted a large-scale analysis of anonymized Google News users click logs. Based on the log analysis, we developed a Bayesian framework for predicting users' current news interests from the activities of that particular user and the news trends demonstrated in the activity of all users. We combine the content-based recommendation mechanism which uses learned user profiles with an existing collaborative filtering mechanism to generate personalized news recommendations. The hybrid recommender system was deployed in Google News. Experiments on the live traffic of Google News website demonstrated that the hybrid method improves the quality of news recommendation and increases traffic to the site.

We propose the concept of research trails to help web users create and reestablish context across fragmented research processes without requiring them to explicitly structure and organize the material. A research trail is an ordered sequence of web pages that were accessed as part of a larger investigation; they are automatically constructed by filtering and organizing users' activity history, using a combination of semantic and activity based criteria for grouping similar visited web pages. The design was informed by an ethnographic study of ordinary people doing research on the web, emphasizing a need to support research processes that are fragmented and where the research question is still in formation. This paper motivates and describes our algorithms for generating research trails.

In this paper, we present a prototype system that helps users in early-stage web research to create and reestablish context across fragmented work process, without requiring them to explicitly collect and organize the material they visit. The system clusters a user's web history and shows it as research trails. We present two user interaction models with the research trails. The first interaction model is implemented as a standalone application, which presents a hierarchical view of research trails. The second interaction model is integrated with the web browser. It shows the user's research trails as selectable and manipulable visual streams when they open a new tab. Thereby, the NewTab page serves as a springboard in the browser for a user resuming an ongoing task.

We conducted a 6-month project with a physical therapy clinic, involving equal parts ethnographic fieldwork and rapid prototyping. It differed from most reported user-informed design by having an explicit dual purpose. On the one hand, the prototype should provide significant, measurable improvements for the field site. On the other hand, the project sponsor did not intend to develop the prototype into a product but rather identify future opportunities and needs in the small-to-medium health care sector, requirements for next generation multifunction peripherals (MFPs), and business applications of existing technology. Thus, the project simultaneously investigated specific solutions for a specific work practice while looking for key technologies to address future needs. This paper provides a detailed account of the process and results, highlighting particular contingencies that come with a dual-purpose exploration, as well as the benefits of a small, focused team that oscillates between research and deployment.

In this paper we describe a system for creating and exposing relationships between documents: a user's interaction with digital objects (like documents) is interpreted as links - to be discovered and maintained by the system. Such relationships are created automatically, requiring no priming by the user. Using a very simple set of heuristics, we demonstrate the uniquely useful relationships that can be established between documents that have been touched by the user. Furthermore, this mechanism for relationship building is media agnostic, thus discovering relationships that would not be found by conventional content based approaches. We describe a proof-of-concept implementation of this basic idea and discuss a couple of natural expansions of the scope of user activity monitoring.

The function failure design method was introduced to enable failure-based decision-making during the early stages of conceptual design. In ongoing work, design researchers are validating this design method on NASA mission design data. To facilitate the adoption of this method by practicing design engineers, a user-centered design approach is applied to the development of the design method tools. This paper describes the multi-disciplinary approach used in this development effort which brings together user-centered design and design methodology research. The preliminary findings include descriptions of user work practice that should be supported by the decision-support tools. The goal of this work is to develop user interface prototype technologies to the level where they can be deployed in usability studies.

The Palette is a digital appliance designed for intuitive control of electronic slide shows. Current interfaces demand too much of our attention to permit effective computer use in situations where we can not give the technology our fullest concentration. The Palette uses index cards that are printed with slide content that is easily identified by both humans and computers. The presenter controls the presentation by directly manipulating the cards. The Palette design is based on our observation of presentations given in a real work setting. Our experiences using the system are described, including new practices (e.g., collaborative presentation, enhanced notetaking) that arise from the affordances of this new approach. This system is an example of a new interaction paradigm called tacit interaction that supports users who can spare very little attention to a computer interface.

The AROMA project is exploring the kind of awareness that people effortless are able to maintain about other beings who are located physically close.We are designing technology that attempts to mediate a similar kind of awareness among people who are geographically dispersed but want to stay better in touch.AROMA technology can be thought of as a stand-alone communication device or -more likely --an augmentation of existing technologies such as the telephone or full-blown media spaces.Our approach differs from other recent designs for awareness (a) by choosing pure abstract representations on the display site, (b) by possibly remapping the signal across media between capture and display, and, finally, (c) by explicitly extending the application domain to include more than the working life, to embrace social interaction in general.We are building a series of prototypes to learn if abstract representation of activity data does indeed convey a sense of remote presence and does so in a sutTiciently subdued manner to allow the user to concentrate on his or her main activity.We have done some initial testing of the technical feasibility of our designs.What still remains is an extensive effort of designing a symbolic language of remote presence, done in parallel with studies of how people will connect and communicate through such a language as they live with the AROMA system.

This paper describes the Liveboard, a large interactive display system. With nearly one million pixels and an accurate, multi-state, cordless pen, the Liveboard provides a basis for research on user interfaces for group meetings, presentations and remote collaboration. We describe the underlying hardware and software of the Liveboard, along with several software applications that have been developed. In describing the system, we point out the design rationale that was used to make various choices. We present the results of an informal survey of Liveboard users, and describe some of the improvements that have been made in response to user feedback. We conclude with several general observations about the use of large public interactive displays.