People complete tasks more quickly when they have concrete plans. However, they often fail to create such action plans. (How) can systems provide these concrete steps automatically? This article demonstrates that these benefits can also be realized when these plans are created by others or reused from similar tasks. Four experiments test these approaches, finding that people indeed complete more tasks when they receive externally-created action plans. To automatically provide plans, we introduce the Genies workflow that combines benefits of crowd wisdom, collaborative refinement, and automation. We demonstrate and evaluate this approach through the TaskGenies system, and introduce an NLP similarity algorithm for reusing plans. We demonstrate that it is possible for people to create action plans for others, and we show that it can be cost effective.
This paper introduces privacy and accountability techniques for crowd-powered systems. We focus on email task management: tasks are an implicit part of every inbox, but the overwhelming volume of incoming email can bury important requests. We present EmailValet, an email client that recruits remote assistants from an expert crowdsourcing marketplace. By annotating each email with its implicit tasks, EmailValet's assistants create a task list that is automatically populated from emails in the user's inbox. The system is an example of a valet approach to crowdsourcing, which aims for parsimony and transparency in access control for the crowd. To maintain privacy, users specify rules that define a sliding-window subset of their inbox that they are willing to share with assistants. To support accountability, EmailValet displays the actions that the assistant has taken on each email. In a weeklong field study, participants completed twice as many of their email-based tasks when they had access to crowdsourced assistants, and they became increasingly comfortable sharing their inbox with assistants over time.
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