William C. Hill

Recommending and evaluating choices in a virtual community of use

When making a choice in the absence of decisive first-hand knowledge, choosing as other like-minded, similarly-situated people have successfully chosen in the past is a good strategy — in effect, using other people as filters and guides: filters to strain out potentially bad choices and guides to point out potentially good choices. Current human-computer interfaces largely ignore the power of the social strategy. For most choices within an interface, new users are left to fend for themselves and if necessary, to pursue help outside of the interface. We present a general history-of-use method that automates a social method for informing choice and report on how it fares in the context of a fielded test case: the selection of videos from a large set. The positive results show that communal history-of-use data can serve as a powerful resource for use in interfaces.

Edit wear and read wear

We describe two applications that illustrate the idea of computational wear in the domain of document processing. By graphically depicting the history of author and reader interactions with documents, these applications offer otherwise unavailable information to guide work. We discuss how their design accords with a theory of professional work and an informational physics perspective on interface design.

History‐enriched digital objects: Prototypes and policy issues

Recording on digital objects (e.g., reports, forms, source‐code, manual pages, email, spreadsheets) the interaction events that comprise their use makes it possible on future occasions, when the objects are used again, to display graphical abstractions of the accrued histories as parts of the objects themselves. It also makes it possible to search for objects by their use and, under certain circumstances, to find people through objects used in common. Prototypes built to explore this idea (e.g., Edit Wear, Read Wear, Email Wear, and Vita Service) demonstrate the costs and benefits of using objects in the context of their interaction histories. The prototypes also raise issues concerning the nature, ownership, and appropriate use of personal information.

An introduction to HITS: Human Interface Tool Suite

Computers are the most plastic medium yet invented for the representation and propagation of information. They can mimic the behaviors of other information media and manifest behaviors not possible in any other medium. They provide us with interactive representational media of potentially revolutionary consequence. To realize the communicative potential of these new computationally-based media we must understand how to employ them to construct collaborative multimedia interfaces to high-functionality systems. In this report, we introduce the Human Interface Tool Suite, an integrated set of tools for the construction of collaborative multimedia interfaces. Rather than documenting HITS as a user or reference manual would, we explain the ideas that motivate the HITS research programme. Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation Advanced Computer Architecture Human Interface Laboratory 3500 West Balcones Center Drive Austin, Texas 78720 (512) 343-0978 Copyright c 1988 Microelectronics and Computer Technology Corporation All rights reserved. Shareholders and associates of MCC may reproduce and distribute these materials for internal purposes by retaining MCCs copyright notice, proprietary legends, and markings on all complete and partial copies. NT E R FACE B y M C C AN INTRODUCTION TO HITS: HUMAN INTERFACE TOOL SUITE James Hollan, Elaine Rich, William Hill, David Wroblewski, Wayne Wilner, Kent Wittenburg, Jonathan Grudln, and Members of the Human Interface Laboratory

DETENTE: practical support for practical action

Complex tasks consist of many threads of activity to remember and coordinate. Managing these threads is a significant part of problem solving. Our research attempts to find ways to assist this process. In this paper we present DETENTE, an object-oriented system to embed agendas in complex application interfaces.

Deixis and the future of visualization excellence

The authors maintain that of particular importance for visualization excellence is an understanding of effective deictic facilities, especially new techniques made possible by computation. They explain what deixis is and why it is fundamental to visualization and they analyze some of the requirements for effective deixis in the context of emergent visualization technology.<<ETX>>

Multimedia environments for scientists

This paper addresses the question of how the work of the scientist will change in the new multimedia environments. Scenarios for the process of simulating and analyzing data in such environments are constructed, and some of the underlying models used in their construction are examined.<<ETX>>

The role of the system image in intelligent user assistance

Many researchers have demonstrated the ways in which well-designed graphical interfaces allow users to acquire conceptual models of the interfaces and the application programs behind these interfaces. It is also clear that the users’ models are initially flawed and incomplete, and the problems that users have with these systems revolve around the misconceptions and alternate conceptualizations in these models. Our work indicates that graphical interfaces may be especially sensitive to misconceptions, and that advisory systems for these kinds of systems must anticipate and resolve such problems. In particular, they must be able to understand alternative conceptual models of the system, and may need to diagnose and remediate these misconceptions. We will describe our work on direct manipulation interfaces and intelligent advisory systems, focusing on the problems people encounter when using interfaces and the ways in which our advisors design is being driven by the properties of graphical interfaces.

IDEA: FROM ADVISING TO COLLABORATION

IDEA is an application independent environment for the development of intelligent advisory systems for a wide range of interactive computer interfaces. Our work on IDEA addresses two particular aspects of these systems:

New uses and abuses of interaction history: help form the research agenda

Recording human-computer interaction for the purposes of reusing commands, undoing actions, recovering from crashes, constructing keyboard macros, and observing users has been with us since the earliest command shells and text editors. For much of that time it remained a sleepy “back water” technology area except for a continuing increase in work-monitoring and associated incidents breeching user privacy. However, with the drastic fall of costs for digital storage, processing and telecommunications, all that is now rapidly changing. Digital records of activity are common at work, market-place and home. While new interaction history techniques such as design capture, automatic change bars, readwear, interface agents, digital audio recording, hot lists, version management, viewer histories, automatic biography, usability studies, active badges, wireless personal communicators, position-sensing and caller-id are enriching the experience of interfaces, the same techniques are enabling new and more invasive abuses. This one-day interdisciplinary workshop will gather 20 practitioners and researchers from the fields of human-computer interaction design, research, ethics and law to produce their “Top Ten” list of research questions concerning uses and abuses of interaction history for the CHI community to address in the coming years. There will be no presentations, but homework will be collected and redistributed via email prior to the workshop. The day will blend open discussions with directed small-group works.