MixTAPE

Abstract

Checklists and action plans are a proven mechanism for project-based collaboration. Synthesizing project-specific plans is challenging, as project managers must consider multiple sources of information, from structured surveys to semi-structured conversations with stakeholders. In a needfinding study with project managers, we identified challenges in creating action plans for teams. We built MixTAPE, a mixed-initiative system that addressed these challenges with three components: a semi-structured note-taking interface for capturing stakeholder conversations, a plan generator for automatically combining multi-source information into action plans, and classification models for assigning and prioritizing action items. We evaluated MixTAPE in an observational study of 32 website design projects. Compared to a previously unstructured process, MixTAPE generated 1.45X as many tasks that are more consistent, while reducing the plan creation time by 33.70%. Through interviews and surveys, we found that participants rate MixTAPE highly across several measures. Based on our findings, we discuss the implications and opportunities for mixed-initiative action plan creation.

Towards Transparent, Reusable, and Customizable Data Science in Computational Notebooks

“…Since notebooks can be collaborative, Magneton widgets may need to accommodate shared workflows. Collaboration introduces new challenges, such as enforcing access control mechanisms, characterizing the role of users, and instrumenting conflict resolution techniques [35], all of which indicate the possibility of interesting future research. Within the collaborative setting, another dimension is the plasticity of interfaces [28] -the perceived value of an interface may vary across stakeholders.…”