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"Readness": a design exploration of personal document management in historical and collaborative context
Abstract
When faced with many documents, people often use systems that characterize documents as read or unread. Most email and document management systems treat this distinction as a binary - either a document has been read, or not. This poster explores designs that expand this binary distinction into a continuum of "readness," based on the user's personal history and collaborative context. The work focuses on late-breaking design concepts.
... For example, version control for document collections is an important design challenge and one that will need to be included in future mixed-media collaborative environments. Innovative visualization and interaction methods for large document collections such as [14, 17, 27, 29, 30, 31] may also be useful for supporting version tracking and mapping various social views onto shared documents. ...
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.
We describe two applications that illustrate the idea of comp-utational wear in the domain of document processing. By graphically depicting the history of author and reader inter-actions 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.
Recommender systems attempt to reduce information overload and retain customers by selecting a subset of items from a universal set based on user preferences. While research in recommender systems grew out of information retrieval and filtering, the topic has steadily advanced into a legitimate and challenging research area of its own. Recommender systems have traditionally been studied from a content-based filtering vs. collaborative design perspective. Recommendations, however, are not delivered within a vacuum, but rather cast within an informal community of users and social context. Therefore, ultimately all recommender systems make connections among people and thus should be surveyed from such a perspective. This viewpoint is under-emphasized in the recommender systems literature. We therefore take a connection-oriented viewpoint toward recommender systems research. We posit that recommendation has an inherently social element and is ultimately intended to connect people either directly as a result of explicit user modeling or indirectly through the discovery of relationships implicit in extant data. Thus, recommender systems are characterized by how they model users to bring people together: explicitly or implicitly. Finally, user modeling and the connection-centric viewpoint raise broadening and social issues--such as evaluation, targeting, and privacy and trust--which we also briefly address.