John C. Tang

Lilsys: Sensing Unavailability

As communications systems increasingly gather and propagate information about peoples reachability or ``presence, users need better tools to minimize undesired interruptions while allowing desired ones. We review the salient elements of presence and availability that people use when initiating face-to-face communication. We discuss problems with current strategies for managing ones availability in telecommunication media. We describe a prototype system called Lilsys which passively collects availability cues gathered from users actions and environment using ambient sensors and provides machine inferencing of unavailability. We discuss observations and design implications from deploying Lilsys.

Business activity patterns: a new model for collaborative business applications

In this paper, we describe the vision behind the Unified Activity Management project at IBM Research. In particular, we describe and discuss activities, activity-centered computing, and activity patterns and illustrate the potential impact of this approach and its value to individuals, teams, and the enterprise. We discuss business activities and their integration into the development of business processes. We share insights from user studies and feedback from customers on the benefits of the activity model in a variety of business settings.

Approaching and leave-taking: Negotiating contact in computer-mediated communication

A major difference between face-to-face interaction and computer-mediated communication is how contact negotiation---the way in which people start and end conversations---is managed. Contact negotiation is especially problematic for distributed group members who are separated by distance and thus do not share many of the cues needed to help mediate interaction. An understanding of what resources and cues people use to negotiate making contact when face-to-face identifies ways to design support for contact negotiation in new technology to support remote collaboration. This perspective is used to analyze the design and use experiences with three communication prototypes: Desktop Conferencing Prototype, Montage, and Awarenex. These prototypes use text, video, and graphic indicators to share the cues needed to gracefully start and end conversations. Experiences with using these prototypes focused on how these designs support the interactional commitment of the participants---when they have to commit their attention to an interaction and how flexibly that can be negotiated. Reviewing what we learned from these research experiences identifies directions for future research in supporting contact negotiation in computer-mediated communication.

Exploring patterns of social commonality among file directories at work

We studied files stored by members of a work organization for patterns of social commonality. Discovering identical or similar documents, applications, developer libraries, or other files may suggest shared interests or experience among users. Examining actual file data revealed a number of individual and aggregate practices around file storage. For example, pairs of users typically have many (over 13,000) files in common. A prototype called LiveWire exploits this commonality to make file backup and restore more efficient for a work organization. We removed commonly shared files and focused on specific filetypes that represent user activity to find more meaningful files in common. The Consolidarity project explores how patterns of file commonality could encourage social networking in an organizational context. Mechanisms for addressing the privacy concerns raised by this approach are discussed.

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.

Recent shortcuts: using recent interactions to support shared activities

We present an empirical study of teams that revealed the amount of extraneous individual work needed to enable collaboration: finding references to other people, finding files to attach to email, managing incoming email attachments, managing the variety of files used in shared activities, and tracking what work is owed to others. Much of this work involves finding recently accessed objects that are needed again in the users current task focus. These observations led to the design of Recent Shortcuts, a tool to help support coordination by making recently used objects easily accessible. Recent Shortcuts enables quick access to people (including groups of people), received attachments, files, and file folders that the user interacted with recently for re-use in the users current context. Recent Shortcuts makes it easy to use these objects across applications with no additional user input and minimal changes to the users applications or work practice. Early user experiences with a working prototype led to an extension that integrates recently accessed objects across multiple devices.

Incorporating human and machine interpretation of unavailability and rhythm awareness into the design of collaborative applications

ABSTRACT Efficient coordination of collaboration requires sharing information about collaborators current and future availability. We describe the usage of an awareness system called Awarenex that shared real-time awareness information to help coordinate activities at the current moment. We also developed a prototype called Lilsys that used sensors to gather additional awareness information that would help avoid disruptions when users are currently unavailable for interaction. Our experiences over time in designing and using prototypes that share awareness cues for current availability led us to identify temporal patterns that could help predict future reachability. Rhythm awareness is having a sense of regularly recurring temporal patterns that can help coordinate interactions among collaborators. Rhythm awareness is difficult to establish within distributed groups that are separated by distance and time zone. We describe rhythmic temporal patterns observed in activity data collected from users of the Awarenex prototype. Analyzing logs of Awarenex usage over time enabled us to construct a computational model of temporal patterns. We explored how to apply those patterns and model to predict future reachability among distributed team members. We discuss trade-offs in the design of collaborative applications that rely on human- and machine-interpretation of rhythm awareness cues. We also conducted a design study that elicited reactions to a variety of end-user visualizations of rhythmic patterns and investigated how well our computational model characterized their everyday routines.

Unobtrusive but invasive: using screen recording to collect field data on computer-mediated interaction

We explored the use of computer screen plus audio recording as a methodological approach for collecting empirical data on how teams use their computers to coordinate work. Screen recording allowed unobtrusive collecting of a rich record of actual computer work activity in its natural work setting. The embedded nature of screen recording on laptops made it easy to follow the users mobility among various work sites. However, the invasiveness of seeing all of the users interactions with and through the computer raised privacy concerns that made it difficult to find people to agree to participate in this type of detailed study. We discuss measures needed to develop trust with the researchers to enable access to this rich, empirical data of computer usage in the field.

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.

Shared landmarks in complex coordination environments

We explore the concept of social landmarks in complex, shared information and coordination environments. Previous research in navigation and shared spaces has tended to emphasize individual navigation, formally inscribed spaces, social filtering, and boundary objects. Based on ethnographic research into complex collaborative work in organizations, we extend the concept of navigational landmarks to include not only individually-used documents, but also shared landmarks in the form of persons, roles, and events. This emerging concept of social landmarks may be applied in identifying and representing these coordinating points, to support the work of teams and organizations in complex projects.