Richard M. Bentley

Supporting memory for spatial location while reading from small displays

Research has shown that when people read paper documents, they develop an incidental memory for the location of information within those documents. However, this kind of spatial memory is undermined in conventional on-line scrolling interfaces. We report on an experiment in which we show that careful design of the interface can reinstate memory for spatial location. As we will show, this has particular implications for the design of interfaces for small screen displays.

Getting some perspective: using process descriptions to index document history

Process descriptions are used in workflow and related systems to describe the flow of work and organisational responsibility in business processes, and to aid in coordination. However, the division of a working process into a sequence of steps provides only a partial view of the work involved. In many cases, the performance of individual tasks in a larger process may depend on interpretations and understandings of how other aspects of the work were conducted. We present an example from an ethnographic investigation of one particular organisation, and introduce a mechanism, which we call “Perspectives,” for dealing with it. A “Perspective” uses the process description to provide an index into the history of a document moving through a process. Perspectives allow workflow systems to manage and present information about the execution of specific process instances within the general frame of abstract process descriptions.