The use of an automatic “To Do” list to guide structured interaction

Abstract

Knowledge-driven editors can improve productivity by taking care of the low-level details of a design artifact, and by guiding the user through an interaction. Despite this, editors that dictate their knowledge too strongly can actually reduce usability by forbidding a sequence of interactions that the user has planned -a sequence that may be the most natural to the user. This paper introduces the use of an automatically managed "To Do" list as the primary method for the knowledge agent to communicate to the user. The 'To Do" list guides the user to a correctly constructed design artifact, without overly constraining the user.

Revisiting ethnography by proxy

“…Hitherto, this process of requirements capture involved a salesperson eliciting information from the customer about their needs and preferences in a face-to-face meeting and rapidly sketching their proposed designs for the electronic system on paper. This was followed at a later stage by engineers and the marketing department drawing up a detailed and costed specification (Rogers, 1995). The purpose of CORECT was to speed up this process, make it more responsive to the client's needs and facilitate communication between the different parties, enabling various actors in the commissioning process to add data and make changes.…”

“…He preferred to continue with paper-based notes so he could annotate, locate information, and draw technical diagrams easily. Nevertheless, his role was successful inasmuch as the design took account of various aspects of his input and a working prototype to run on a laptop was subsequently developed that included an automatically generated 'to do' list that guided the user to a correctly constructed design artefact, with prompts for more detail where needed but without overly constraining the options (Rogers, 1995).…”

Software architecture critics in the Argo design environment

“…Argo's "to do" list is useful because it reduces the architect's reliance on short-term memory and provides convenient ways to organize and browse items. A dynamic "to do" list metaphor is also used in the Collaborative Requirements Capture Tool [32].…”

Untitled

“…Workplace interaction is a phenomenon that has been a focal object of study within the areas of HCI (human-computer interaction) and CSCW (computer-supported cooperative work) for around 20 years now. During this time, the character of workplace interaction has been explored from a wide range of perspectives ranging from empirical studies of one-shot interaction (Aaronson & Carroll, 1987), serendipitous interaction (Landgren & Nuldén, 2007), casual interaction (Borning & Travers, 1991;Whittaker, Frohlich, & Daly-Jones, 1994;Whittaker, Swanson, Kucan, & Sidner, 1997), long-term social interaction (Whittaker, Jones, & Terveen, 2002), and spontaneous interaction (Lim, Zhang, Zhu, & Zheng, 2007), to studies of formal interaction (Oehlmann, Thoben, & Weber, 1997), planned interaction (Isaacs, Tang, & Morris, 1996), and structured interaction (Rogers, 1995). While this body of research has mainly focused upon the formal and informal aspects of workplace interaction, we have so far seen few studies with an explicit focus on how individuals active in these social work arrangements go about searching for each other to establish interaction, and how social factors govern this behavior.…”