stanford hci group

undergraduate honors thesis

Taskposé: A Dynamic Task-Based Window Management Aid Michael Bernsteinmbernst@stanford.edu01 June 2006

Thesis Advisor: Jeff Shrager, Symbolic SystemsSecond Reader: Terry Winograd, Computer Science

06 June 2006 2Honors Thesis

The Problem What goes with what?

06 June 2006 3Honors Thesis

The Approach: Tasks

Task: a high-level goal toward which a person’s actions are directed

Can subsume sets of artifacts into larger task groupings

06 June 2006 4Honors Thesis

Writing a PaperHigh-Level Task

Organizing Force

Piles and Files

Physical World

Draft 1 w/ Comments

Rolodex

Draft 2

Reference Book

Artifacts

06 June 2006 5Honors Thesis

Writing a PaperHigh-Level Task Digital World

MS Word Document

Browser Window

MS Word Document 2

Browser Window 2

Browser Window 3

MS Outlook

Yahoo! IM

iTunesOrganizing Force

Artifacts

Windows Taskbar

06 June 2006 6Honors Thesis

My Focus: Windows (The artifacts, not the operating system) Likely to persist for the foreseeable

future Good (though not perfect) mapping onto

artifacts of interest Current approach is not scaling: Windows

taskbar, OS X dock, Exposé

06 June 2006 7Honors Thesis

Tasks and Windows Managers Problem: How can a computer

know when two windows are part of the same task? The Agnostic Answer: It can’t. We’ll

let users tell the computer which windows are related.

The Predictive Answer: There is some set of heuristics we can use to effectively predict which windows are semantically related.

06 June 2006 8Honors Thesis

Agnostic Window Managers

Task Gallery (Robertson et al.)

Rooms (Card et al.) GroupBar (Smith et al.)

06 June 2006 9Honors Thesis

Kimura (MacIntyre et al.)

Predictive Windows Managers

TaskTracer (Dragunov et al.)

06 June 2006 10Honors Thesis

Task Classification Work artifacts are placed strictly in

one task Binary: Is it part of this task, or no?

MS Word Document

Bro

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Win

dow

MS W

ord

Docu

ment

2

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wser

Win

dow

2

Bro

wser W

ind

ow

3

MS

Ou

tlook Y

ahoo!

IM

iTunes

06 June 2006 11Honors Thesis

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

“So, what task is this window part of?” TaskTracer: “Users are often able

to tell the system what it is not, but not what it is.”

Activity Based Computing: “The worst thing? Well [...] you need to constantly consider ‘where does this one belong’.”

06 June 2006 12Honors Thesis

Anecdotally…

Log on to Amazon.com to buy a book, but get distracted by a related work. Are you still “buying a book?” Are you not “buying a book?”

Originally write a literature review for a paper, but later refer to it when creating slides. Is it still part of the “CHI Paper” task?

06 June 2006 13Honors Thesis

Task Association, not Classification

Association: artifacts may identify with tasks at varying degrees Strongly associated with one task Weakly associated with several tasks Associated with nothing at all

Aligns more closely with users’ mental models of their workspace

06 June 2006 14Honors Thesis

The Goal: Taskposé

Build an associative window manager

Group of related windows

Movement occurs asheuristics are updated withadditional knowledge

06 June 2006 15Honors Thesis

Demo

06 June 2006 16Honors Thesis

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06 June 2006 19Honors Thesis

06 June 2006 20Honors Thesis

Association and Importance Related windows appear closer

together the more related Taskposé believes them to be.

Important windows appear larger and stay put, while unimportant windows shrink and move more.

06 June 2006 21Honors Thesis

Implementation

Proof of Concept: not an algorithms thesis WindowRank Weighted Associations

06 June 2006 22Honors Thesis

Evaluation

Weeklong user study Found a high likelihood of

integrating a “perfect” version of the system into regular work practice Median 6/7 on a Likert scale

06 June 2006 23Honors Thesis

Evaluation Cont’d

In interviews, confirmed that the visualization strategy was viable

None suggested that strict task groupings would have been preferred, or brought them up at all

06 June 2006 24Honors Thesis

Evaluation Cont’d Again

Scaling System most useful when open

windows outstripped the capacity of the taskbar

Algorithms Importance and relationship tracking

algorithms were “passable” Classes of problems: parent-child

relationships, multiple simultaneous tasks

06 June 2006 25Honors Thesis

Future Directions

Rethinking of classical machine learning algorithms

Other instantiations of the same idea One-dimensional Distance scaling

06 June 2006 26Honors Thesis

Thank you!

Jeff Shrager Symbolic Systems Program and

Honors College (esp. Todd Davies) Terry Winograd, Scott Klemmer, Erica Robles, Victoria

Bellotti, Jim Thornton, Ed Chi, Duke Hutchings, Simone Stumpf, Jon Herlocker, Thomas Dietterich and the TaskTracer team, Greg Smith, Mary Czerwinski, Pat Langley, Stephen Voida, Jim Hollan, Adam Perer and Bjoern Hartmann