Eric Wilcox

Do you know?: recommending people to invite into your social network

In this paper we describe a novel UI and system for providing users with recommendations of people to invite into their explicit enterprise social network. The recommendations are based on aggregated information collected from various sources across the organization and are displayed in a widget, which is part of a popular enhanced employee directory. Recommended people are presented one by one, with detailed reasoning as for why they were recommended. Usage results are presented for a period of four months that indicate an extremely significant impact on the number of connections created in the system. Responses in the organizations blogging system, a survey with over 200 participants, and a set of interviews we conducted shed more light on the way the widget is used and implications of the design choices made.

One-hundred days in an activity-centric collaboration environment based on shared objects

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is carefully poised between informal, ad hoc, easy-to-initiate collaborative tools, vs. more formal, structured, and high-overhead collaborative applications. Our approach focuses on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared objects with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed first look at data from the first 100 days of usage by 20 researchers and 13 interns, who both confirmed our hypotheses and surprised us by reinventing the technology in several ways.

Designing remail: reinventing the email client through innovation and integration

The Remail design team defined a specification for an innovative and integrated email client. This design-lead effort tackled three key problems that email researchers have discovered: lack of context, co-opting of email, and keeping track of too many things. Based on earlier design and research explorations, we conceived of a client from the ground up that attacked these problems in an integrated fashion. Our solutions were based on three constructs: showing message context, marking email, and selective display. A small team of programmers implemented much of the design in a functional prototype. This experimental client continues to allow researchers to expand and explore these concepts.

Activity explorer: activity-centric collaboration from research to product

Activity Explorer is the first product from IBM that supports the notion of activity-centric collaboration. This new collaboration paradigm organizes and integrates resources, tools, and people around the computational concept of a work activity, with the goal of increasing work quality and efficiency. In essence, activity-centric collaboration is an important and compelling example of contextual collaboration. Activity Explorer emerged from a multiyear research effort on activity-centric collaboration. This paper presents an overview of the most significant milestones of this research program and highlights the most interesting findings. The research behind Activity Explorer is based on many empirical studies, design explorations, and infrastructural engineering and technical simulations. We demonstrate how our research not only influenced product direction, but also the IBM vision for activity-centric collaboration.

FeedMe: a collaborative alert filtering system

As the number of alerts generated by collaborative applications grows, users receive more unwanted alerts. FeedMe is a general alert management system based on XML feed protocols such as RSS and ATOM. In addition to traditional rule-based alert filtering, FeedMe uses techniques from machine-learning to infer alert preferences based on user feedback. In this paper, we present and evaluate a new collaborative naïve Bayes filtering algorithm. Using FeedMe, we collected alert ratings from 33 users over 29 days. We used the data to design and verify the accuracy of the filtering algorithm and provide insights into alert prediction.

Patterns of media use in an activity-centric collaborative environment

This paper describes a new collaboration technology that is based on the support of lightweight, informally structured, opportunistic activities featuring heterogeneous threads of shared items with dynamic membership. We introduce our design concepts, and we provide a detailed analysis of user behavior during a five month field study. We present the patterns of media use that we observed, using a variety of analytical methods including thread clustering and analysis. Major findings include four patterns of media use: communicating, exchanging mixed objects, coordinating, (e.g., of status reports), and semi-archival filing. We observed differential use of various media including highly variable use of chats and surprisingly informal uses of files. We discuss the implications for the design of mixed media collaborative tools to support the work activities of small to medium sized work teams.

Tag-it, snag-it, or bag-it: combining tags, threads, and folders in e-mail

We describe the design of bluemail, a web-based email system that provides message tagging, message threading, and email folders. We wanted to explore how this combination of features would help users manage and organize their email. We conducted a limited field test of the prototype by observing how users triage their own email using bluemail. Our study identified ways in which users liked tagging, threading, and foldering capabilities, but also some of the complex ways in which they can interact. Our study elicited early user input to guide the iterative design of these features. It also involved a user study researcher, designer, and developer in the field test to quickly integrate different perspectives during development.

Chat spaces

Chat Spaces are rich persistent chats that provide light-weight shared workspaces for small to medium-scale group activities. Chat Spaces can accommodate brief, informal interactions (similar to Instant Messaging), and can also support longer-term complex threaded conversations including large numbers of people and shared resources. Our design maps a hierarchical thread representation onto a time-ordered two-column user interface. This mapping allows a user to follow the global dynamics of the entire thread in the chronological column on the left while being able to participate in a selected topical branch in a second column on the right. We also present a dynamic thread map that provides an overview of the entire conversation and supports quick navigation of topical branches in the thread.

Global differences in attributes of email usage

Email usage data from users in a large enterprise were analyzed according to country and geographical regions to explore for differences. Data of 13,877 employees from 29 countries in a global technology company were analyzed. We found statistically significant differences in several attributes of email usage. Users in the U.S. tend to retain larger numbers of email messages while Latin American countries keep fewer messages. European countries tend to file more of their email into folders and Asian countries tend to do less so. These differences in filing behavior are not correlated with Hofstedes Uncertainty Avoidance Index. This research adds another dimension for studies of email usage which previously have not reported the geographical source of their data.

Malibu personal productivity assistant

The Malibu system provides peripheral access to andawareness of activities, tasks, social-bookmarkresources, and feeds to assist knowledge workers intheir activity-centric work. We describe theexperimental system, a usage scenario and somepreliminary usage data.