Re-framing the Desktop Interface Around the Activities of Knowledge Work

Stephen Voida et al., University of Calgary

Summary

This paper argues that current desktop systems are too much focused on documents and applications and that in the age of multi-tasking and collaboration, an activity oriented desktop system has substantial advantages.

Details

Authors present historical background of existing desktop systems and how they are not a good fit for handling ‘fluid work’ practices. Authors start off with a scenario where a person organises his computing into activities and desktop switches context according to current activity of user. Key points here are enabling activity based resource storage, multitasking, tagging and collaboration support. This exist from existing solutions which are either standalone or do not provide contextual resources.

The Giornata interface designed for this purpose feels familiar to the concept of ‘workspaces’ except that instead of fitting activities into fixed workspaces, a ‘workspace’ is created for each new activity. Giornata goes further by providing activity specific storage, contact palette and tags. This supports collaborative work and implicit hierarchical organization of resources instead of having users to handle it themselves.

Giornata is implemented as a Carbon, Cocoa and AppleScript based application for OS X and works by adding two layers to existing window manager. Explicit layer provides Contact palette and activity management while implicit layer acts as a persistent information display for each activity. While authors envisage more tools like Contact palette to provide activity-based interaction, they admit that extending closed source window managers and balancing ‘local work’ and ‘communicative interactions’ is technically challenging. Supporting a reliable restore facility in case of system crash would require development of new programming frameworks. User study performed on five people provided positive reviews although authors do not discuss them in detail.

Review

On the face of it, Giornata comes across as an efficient tool in organizing day-to-day activities for anyone who does serious computing work. Parallels can be drawn between mobile apps and Giornata activities and it is clear that such an activity oriented desktop system has substantial benefits.  More than the development of such a tool, I feel the challenge would be to loosely divide various tasks into per-activity or across activity and provide activity specific interactions for former. Authors present Contact palette and resource storage as two such tasks.

Disclaimer

The work discussed above is an original work presented at UIST 2008 by the authors/affiliations indicated at the starting of this post. This post in itself was created as part of course requirement of CPSC 436.