Agnieszka Matysiak Szóstek

'Dealing with My Emails': Latent user needs in email management.

Email is a communication channel that provides a number of benefits. It can be stored, retrieved and forwarded. It also allows a recipient to choose when to uptake communication and how to pace it. However, email also incurs one prevalent cost: the feeling of email overload. One of the reasons leading to that feeling lays in the fact that current email clients do not provide an inbox structure that facilitates email prioritization, information structuring and work-flow management. The goal of this study was to understand the latent user needs regarding handling emails. We identified six such needs: three pertaining to email organization (email annotation, reliable structure and no urgency to classify) and three related to email retrieval (informative overview, flexible sorting and efficient search). We further investigated the dominance, importance and dependencies between these needs. The results were then discussed and implications for future inbox design were proposed.

Factors defining face-to-face interruptions in the office environment

This paper presents an on-going investigation on interruptions in the office caused by face-to-face interactions between knowledge workers. The study aims to identify opportunities for interactive solutions that will support both, the interrupters and the interrupted. The study involves contextual interviews and observations of how administrative assistants manage interruptions.

A look into some practices behind microsoft UX management

This study aimed to acquire an excerpt of insights about UX management practices at Microsoft research and development departments. Related work points out at a two-fold role of UX managers. They are responsible for fostering their team to become independent and self-manageable. Furthermore, their job concerns raising awareness about the value of the user-centered design approach within their organization. This article describes a number of strategies applied at Microsoft Redmond to achieve these two objectives. The described management practices could serve as a guideline helping other UX managers to run their teams and propagate UX values within their organizations.

Design and Evaluation of a Large Interactive Display to Support Social Interaction at Work

Social interaction at work has been shown to enhance creativity and productivity. This paper describes the design and evaluation of a large, interactive display that aims to stimulate social interaction amongst co-workers by providing food for talk in the form of activities, jokes, and music. User and system requirements were collected using Cultural Probes and Focus groups. The evaluation of our prototype system provides valuable insights that may guide the design of future systems supporting social interaction at work.

The needs of early school children and their parents with respect to the design of mobile service offers

The goal of the project was to investigate the needs of early school children and their parents to identify ingredients for a mobile service offer. The results showed a difference regarding such needs between children age 7-8 and age 9-10, and between girls and boys. We identified three categories of needs: safety, entertainment and communication. Based on the findings we proposed a number of implications for the design of mobile service offers for early school children.

What would the parents like to know about children but are afraid to ask?: designing reports about child development in online games

Nowadays educational games constitute a large part of the learning environment. These interactive forms of education enable children to develop various competencies and also provide feedback depicting their strengths and shortcomings. Currently, portals offering educational games provide such feedback mainly to children. Surprisingly, a parent, who is responsible for a proper development and education of a child, is usually not included as a recipient of information about the childs results tested through games. Therefore, the goal of this preliminary study was to investigate the informational needs of the parents that can be applied to educational online games for children of age 6-9.

The Dynamic Nature of Availability

The topic of availability management has been extensively investigated in related research. However, thus far the approach to this subject was primarily motivated by the need to protect an interruptee from an unwanted interruption. In this approach, availability status was assumed to be static: either the interruptee was interactive, thus willing to accept an interruption or interpassive, thus prone to reject it. In this research we would like to propose a different assumption: that availability status has a dynamic rather than a static nature and that both communicators conjointly influence that status. To test that assumption, we explored the nature of availability and factors that are likely to influence it through a series of empirical investigations. These studies have shown that availability state is likely to be influenced by factors such as: social proximity, nature of the communication subject and anticipated interruption duration. We have also observed that while social proximity was shown to be a crucial factor for face-to-face communications, it appeared to have little impact on the availability status in email communications.

Awareness solutions for informal communication negotiation support at work

The goal of our project is to design and evaluate an awareness system that supports handling interruptions for both interruption actors: interruptees and interruptors.