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Giornata: Re-Envisioning the Desktop Metaphor to Support Activities in Knowledge Work

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Giornata: Re-Envisioning the Desktop Metaphor to Support Activities in Knowledge Work Giornata: Re-Envisioning the Desktop Metaphor to Support Activities in Knowledge Work Stephen Voida, Elizabeth D. Mynatt, and W. Keith Edwards GVU Center, College of Computing Georgia Institute of Technology 85 5th Street NW, Atlanta, GA 30332-0760, USA {svoida, mynatt, keith}@cc.gatech.edu ABSTRACT [2]) and reflects theories of cognition that describe the The desktop metaphor is beginning to show signs of strain ways people manage multiple complex tasks (e.g., [1]). 1 in supporting modern knowledge work. Our research seeks With Giornata, we seek to extend the desktop metaphor, to demonstrate how the traditional desktop metaphor can be because it provides a familiar and intuitive means of re-envisioned, replacing a focus on documents and interacting with applications and files. At the same time, applications with user interaction based upon semantically we aim to provide better support for contemporary meaningful activities. knowledge work practices by emphasizing activity as a In this demonstration, we present Giornata, an application primary organizing principle in the interface (Figure 1). that augments the OS X desktop with interface components USER INTERFACE DESIGN IN THE GIORNATA SYSTEM that emphasize the role of activity in knowledge work. Giornata is an Objective-C application that augments the Giornata provides a number of innovative features not existing capabilities of the Mac OS X desktop user present in other systems, including activity-based resource interface. Like other activity-aware systems (e.g., Rooms storage, a mechanism for incrementally tagging activities, [3] and GroupBar [4]), Giornata allows users to view and and integrated tools to foster collaboration within activities. manipulate open windows in clusters that correspond to ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and higher-level activities, since accomplishing one task often presentation]: User Interfaces—Graphical user interfaces. requires the use of information resources spanning multiple General terms: Design, Human Factors applications and documents [2]. However, Giornata goes beyond rudimentary virtual desktop management by Keywords: Activity-based computing, desktop computing, providing activity-based resource storage, a flexible Giornata tagging system that allows users to incrementally annotate INTRODUCTION AND MOTIVATION activities with meaningful descriptors, and integrated tools The desktop metaphor is beginning to show signs of strain to foster collaboration within ongoing activities. in supporting modern knowledge work. The traditional Activity-Based Resource Storage desktop interface includes support for multitasking only on In Giornata, the enhanced desktop serves not only as a a very low-level, per-application window basis and support display space for application windows, but also an active, for collaboration is delegated to other applications and tools ready-at-hand folder for documents and shortcuts rather than being integrated into the desktop directly. associated with the current activity. Any file saved to the Resource organization is becoming increasingly difficult, desktop (by dragging and dropping or by invoking the partially due to an increase in the volume and types of standard “save” menu item within applications) is information referenced in modern knowledge work and automatically associated with the current activity; as the partially due to limitations inherent in the desktop user user switches among ongoing activities by toggling interface design based on decades-old assumptions about between virtual desktops, these resources are “swapped the ways that computers are used. out” along with application windows and temporarily Through Giornata1, we demonstrate how the traditional stored elsewhere on the hard disk until the activity is desktop metaphor can be re-envisioned, replacing a low- resumed. This combination of capabilities scopes the level focus on documents and applications with a user information displayed on the screen at any one time to the interface based upon the creation of and interaction with most relevant applications, information resources, contacts, user-declared, semantically meaningful activities. This and communications when the user is immersed in a activity-based interaction paradigm more closely matches particular activity. observed knowledge work practices (e.g., 1 Giornata is Italian for “day’s work” and is used to denote both the time during the day that work takes place, and, in the Copyright is held by the author/owner(s). UIST'07, October 7–10, 2007, Newport, Rhode Island, USA. context of buon fresco (wet plaster) painting, the physical ACM 978-1-59593-679-2/07/0010 region of a painting that can be completed in a single session. Figure 1. The Giornata user interface. In this screenshot, the user is engaged in an activity of preparing a conference submission. There are several tags (including “research” and “uist”), two open windows, four files (two of them shared), two colleagues, and one group currently associated with this activity. Activity Tagging of the collaborators’ desktops and updated each time the Each activity created in Giornata can be annotated with files’ contents are changed. optional, freeform tags to describe the semantics of the CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE WORK activity. Activities are initially created without tags; the Giornata demonstrates how re-envisioning the desktop ability to create and work in an unnamed activity allows interface could provide a variety of benefits, including work to proceed even when the user might not know the better task awareness, simpler multitasking, more natural significance or eventual meaning of an activity at its outset. organization of information, and improved collaboration When an activity has one or more tags associated with it, while retaining desirable aspects of the existing metaphor. these tags are transferred to each file that the user touches We have deployed Giornata to a variety of knowledge over the course of working in that activity. This design workers and are currently evaluating its usage in the serves to “stamp” files with information about the context context of these users’ everyday work practices. We in which they were created or edited. This also allows anticipate presenting the results of this deployment and documents that are shared across multiple activities to further iterations of Giornata as future work. “inherit” the tags of all the activities. Because Mac OS X’s built-in Spotlight search framework indexes these tags REFERENCES automatically, users can quickly find information resources 1. Boer, N., van Baalen, P.J. and Kumar, K. An activity theory by initiating a search on any combination of the files’ approach for studying the situatedness of knowledge sharing. contents or the activity tags. In Proc. of HICSS-35, 2002. 2. Gonzàlez, V.M. and Mark, G. “Constant, constant multi- Activity-Aware Collaboration Support tasking craziness”: Managing multiple working spheres. In Giornata provides two features to support activity-aware Proc. of CHI ‘04, ACM/SIGCHI, NY, 2004, pp. 113–120. collaboration. First, Giornata integrates a subset of the sharing palette interface [5] to enable lightweight 3. Henderson, J.D.A. and Card, S.K. Rooms: The use of multiple virtual workspaces to reduce space contention in window- collaboration. This “Contact Palette” component provides a based graphical user interfaces. ACM Transactions on persistent visual summary of those individuals and groups Graphics, 5, 3 (Jul. 1986), 211–241. the user has associated with the current activity. Files can 4. Smith, G., Baudisch, P., Robertson, G.G., Czerwinski, M., be dragged and dropped directly on the Contact Palette to Meyers, B., Robbins, D. and Andrews, D. GroupBar: The share a file with a particular contact or group. TaskBar evolved. In Proc. of OZCHI 2003, Univ. of Giornata’s desktop also includes a “shared files” region, Queensland, 2003, pp. 34–43. which provides a persistent, spatial connection among 5. Voida, S., Edwards, W.K., Newman, M.W., Grinter, R.E. and collaborators’ activity desktops. When files are dragged Ducheneaut, N. Share and share alike: Exploring the user into this region, they are automatically replicated on each interface affordances of file sharing. In Proc. of CHI ‘06, ACM/SIGCHI, NY, 2006, pp. 221–230. .
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