Steve Whittaker
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"S. Whittaker"
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Publications by Steve Whittaker (bibliography)
» 2009 «
Bergman, Ofer, Tucker, Simon, Beyth-Marom, Ruth, Cutrell, Edward and Whittaker, Steve (2009): It's not that important: demoting personal information of low subjective importance using GrayArea. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 269-278. Available online
“Users find it hard to delete unimportant personal information which often results in cluttered workspaces. We present a full design cycle for GrayArea, a novel interface that allows users to demote unimportant files by dragging them to a gray area at the bottom of their file folders. Demotion is an intermediate option between keeping and deleting. It combines the advantages of deletion (unimportant files don't compete for attention) and keeping (files are retrieved in their folder context). We developed the GrayArea working prototype using thorough iterative design. We evaluated it by asking 96 participants to 'clean' two folders with, and without, GrayArea. Using GrayArea reduced folder”
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Petrelli, Daniela, Hoven, Elise van den and Whittaker, Steve (2009): Making history: intentional capture of future memories. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2009 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2009. pp. 1723-1732. Available online
“Lifelogging' technology makes it possible to amass digital data about every aspect of our everyday lives. Instead of focusing on such technical possibilities, here we investigate the way people compose long-term mnemonic representations of their lives. We asked 10 families to create a time capsule, a collection of objects used to trigger remembering in the distant future. Our results show that contrary to the lifelogging view, people are less interested in exhaustively digitally recording their past than in reconstructing it from carefully selected cues that are often physical objects. Time capsules were highly expressive and personal, many objects were made explicitly for inclusion, however with little object annotation. We use these findings to propose principles for designing technology that supports the active reconstruction of our future past.”
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Tucker, Simon and Whittaker, Steve (2009): Have a say over what you see: evaluating interactive compression techniques. In: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2009. pp. 37-46. Available online
“We all encounter many documents on a daily basis that we do not have time to process in their entirety. Nevertheless, we lack good tools to rapidly skim and identify key information from within such documents. This paper develops and evaluates Interactive Compression (IC) techniques that allow users to dynamically configure the amount of information they view in a document, e.g. by automatically removing unimportant information from view (Excision) or by making important information more salient (Highlighting). We explore IC techniques in the context of meeting transcripts that are typically unstructured -- making it difficult to isolate relevant regions and extract key information. We demonstrate the superiority of IC compared with an unmodified text control. In contrast to traditional summaries, our results show extensive use of interactive, as opposed to fixed compression level, summarization. They also show the value of word- as opposed to utterance-based compression. There are also trade-offs between different IC designs. Excision allows users to scan documents faster than Highlighting but at the expense of overlooking relevant sections of the document.”
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Pedro, Jose San, Kalnikaité, Vaiva and Whittaker, Steve (2009): You can play that again: exploring social redundancy to derive highlight regions in videos. In: Proceedings of the 2009 International Conference on Intelligent User Interfaces 2009. pp. 469-474. Available online
“Identifying highlights in multimedia content such as video and audio is currently a very difficult technical problem. We present and evaluate a novel algorithm that identifies highlights by combining content analysis with Web 2.0 data mining techniques. We exploit the fact that popular content tends to be redundantly uploaded onto community sharing sites. Our "social summarization" technique first identifies overlaps in uploaded scenes and then uses the upload frequency of each video scene to compute that scene's importance in the complete video. Our user evaluation shows the reliability of the technique: scenes automatically selected by our method are agreed by experts to be the most relevant.”
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» 2008 «
Petrelli, Daniela, Whittaker, Steve and Brockmeier, Jens (2008): AutoTypography: what can physical mementos tell us about digital memories?. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 5-10, 2008. pp. 53-62. Available online
“Current technology makes it possible to capture huge amounts of information related to everyday experiences. Despite this, we know little about the processes by which people identify and manage mementos - objects which are directly meaningful to their memories. Among the millions of objects people encounter in a lifetime, few become such reminders of people, places or events. We report fieldwork where participants gave us a tour of their homes describing how and why particular objects become mementos. Our findings extend the existing digital memory literature; first our participants didn't view their activities as experiential 'capture', nor were mementos limited to pictorial representations of people and events; instead they included everyday objects. Furthermore, mementos were not only displayed and shared, but also integrated into everyday activities. Finally there were complex relations between house location and memento type. We discuss the theoretical and technical implications of our work.”
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Kalnikaité, Vaiva and Whittaker, Steve (2008): Social summarization: does social feedback improve access to speech data?. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW08 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2008. pp. 9-12. Available online
“We extend the notion of social tagging to construct social summaries of complex multimedia materials. Our system allows students to apply time-indexed multimedia tags such as handwritten annotations or photos to different parts of lecture recordings. These tags can be used to straightforwardly access different parts of the lecture. The social component of the interface presents information about which tags are most frequently accessed by others: allowing students to infer those parts of the lecture of most interest to others. We demonstrate the utility of the approach in a 6 week fieldwork study. Social summaries are used much more than corresponding systems that do not provide social information. In addition, social tool use was correlated with high course marks.”
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Bergman, Ofer, Beyth-Marom, Ruth, Nachmias, Rafi, Gradovitch, Noa and Whittaker, Steve (2008): Improved search engines and navigation preference in personal information management. In ACM Transactions on Information Systems, 26 (4) p. 20
“Traditionally users access their personal files mainly by using folder navigation. We evaluate whether recent improvements in desktop search have changed this fundamental aspect of Personal Information Management (PIM). We tested this in two studies using the same questionnaire: (a) The Windows Study, a longitudinal comparison of Google Desktop and Windows XP Search Companion, and (b) The Mac Studya large scale comparison of Mac Spotlight and Sherlock. There were few effects for improved search. First, regardless of search engine, there was a strong navigation preference: on average, users estimated that they used navigation for 56-68% of file retrieval events but searched for only 4-15% of events. Second, the effect of improving the quality of the search engine on search usage was limited and inconsistent. Third, search was used mainly as a last resort when users could not remember file location. Finally, there was no evidence that using improved desktop search engines leads people to change their filing habits to become less reliant on hierarchical file organization. We conclude by offering theoretical explanations for navigation preference, relating to differences between PIM and Internet retrieval, and suggest alternative design directions for PIM systems.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Tucker, Simon, Swampillai, Kumutha and Laban, Rachel (2008): Design and evaluation of systems to support interaction capture and retrieval. In Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 12 (3) pp. 197-221
Axtell, Carolyn, Hislop, Donald and Whittaker, Steve (2008): Mobile technologies in mobile spaces: Findings from the context of train travel. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 20 (12) pp. 902-915
“Whilst mobile work is increasingly prevalent, there is little detailed study of this phenomenon in the specific context of a train. Thus, the current study focuses on how mobile work is conducted onboard trains, as a way of exploring general issues relating to mobility. Through survey and interview data, several constraints to mobile work on the train were revealed. These include the lack of reliable communications network, access to co-workers and lack of privacy which together restrict the types of communicative tasks people carry out. We found that the majority of tasks conducted were socially independent in nature (without the need for communication with others). However, people made some technological task and contextual adaptations which allowed them to work around these limitations to conduct some socially interdependent work (with the need for communication with others). We explain why and how specific technologies/media are used (and adapted) in this setting and explore the implications this has for technology design and our thinking about mobile work.”
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Jones, Quentin, Grandhi, Sukeshini, Karam, Samer, Whittaker, Steve, Zhou, Changqing and Terveen, Loren (2008): Geographic 'Place' and 'Community Information' Preferences. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 17 (2) pp. 137-167
“People dynamically structure social interactions and activities at various locations in their environments in specialized types of places such as the office, home, coffee shop, museum and school. They also imbue various locations with personal meaning, creating group 'hangouts' and personally meaningful 'places'. Mobile location-aware community systems can potentially utilize the existence of such 'places' to support the management of social information and interaction. However, acting effectively on this potential requires an understanding of how: (1) places and place-types relate to people's desire for place-related awareness of and communication with others; and (2) what information people are willing to provide about themselves to enable place-related communication and awareness. We present here the findings from two qualitative studies, a survey of 509 individuals in New York, and a study of how mobility traces can be used to find people's important places in an exploration of these questions. These studies highlight how people value and are willing to routinely provide information such as ratings, comments, event records relevant to a place, and when appropriate their location to enable services. They also suggest how place and place-type data could be used in conjunction with other information regarding people and places so that systems can be deployed that respect users' People-to-People-to-Places data sharing preferences. We conclude with a discussion on how 'place' data can best be utilized to enable services when the systems in question are supported by a sophisticated computerized user-community social-geographical model.”
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Kalnikaité, Vaiva and Whittaker, Steve (2008): Cueing Digital Memory: How and Why do Digital Notes Help Us Remember?. In: Proceedings of the HCI08 Conference on People and Computers XXII 2008. pp. 153-161. Available online
“People are aware of the fact that their memories are fallible. As a result, they spend significant amounts of time preparing for subsequent memory challenges, e.g. by leaving themselves reminders. Recent findings suggest, however, that people's ability to prepare for subsequent retrieval may not always be effective. This paper looks at the efficacy of memory strategies in the context of digital and paper-based note-taking. Prior research has claimed that (a) notes may not always be useful in promoting later retrieval; (b) taking notes may distract people from effectively processing important information. We examined pen and paper note-taking as well as a new generation digital note-taking device ChittyChatty, finding that notes help memory in two ways. First they provide cues that help people retrieve information that they might otherwise forget. Second the act of taking notes helps people to better focus on incoming information even if they never later consult these notes. Finally we found differences between different note-taking strategies. People who take high quality notes remember better than those who focus on exhaustive documentation; taking large volumes of notes decreases the efficiency of retrieval -- possibly because it is more time consuming to scan extensive notes to find relevant retrieval cues.”
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» 2007 «
Kalnikaité, Vaiva and Whittaker, Steve (2007): Software or wetware?: discovering when and why people use digital prosthetic memory. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 71-80. Available online
“Our lives are full of memorable and important moments, as well as important items of information. The last few years have seen the proliferation of digital devices intended to support prosthetic memory (PM), to help users recall experiences, conversations and retrieve personal information. We nevertheless have little systematic understanding of when and why people might use such devices, in preference to their own organic memory (OM). Although OM is fallible, it may be more efficient than accessing information from a complex PM device. We report a controlled lab study which investigates when and why people use PM and OM. We found that PM use depended on users' evaluation of the quality of their OM, as well as PM device properties. In particular, we found that users trade-off Accuracy and Efficiency, preferring rapid access to potentially inaccurate information over laborious access to accurate information. We discuss the implications of these results for future PM design and theory. Rather than replacing OM, future PM designs need to focus on allowing OM and PM to work in synergy.”
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Tang, John C., Lin, James, Pierce, Jeffrey, Whittaker, Steve and Drews, Clemens (2007): Recent shortcuts: using recent interactions to support shared activities. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2007. pp. 1263-1272. Available online
“We present an empirical study of teams that revealed the amount of extraneous individual work needed to enable collaboration: finding references to other people, finding files to attach to email, managing incoming email attachments, managing the variety of files used in shared activities, and tracking what work is owed to others. Much of this work involves finding recently accessed objects that are needed again in the user's current task focus. These observations led to the design of Recent Shortcuts, a tool to help support coordination by making recently used objects easily accessible. Recent Shortcuts enables quick access to people (including groups of people), received attachments, files, and file folders that the user interacted with recently for re-use in the user's current context. Recent Shortcuts makes it easy to use these objects across applications with no additional user input and minimal changes to the user's applications or work practice. Early user experiences with a working prototype led to an extension that integrates recently accessed objects across multiple devices.”
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» 2006 «
Tucker, Simon and Whittaker, Steve (2006): Time is of the essence: an evaluation of temporal compression algorithms. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2006. pp. 329-338. Available online
“Although speech is a potentially rich information source, a major barrier to exploiting speech archives is the lack of useful tools for efficiently accessing lengthy speech recordings. This paper develops and evaluates techniques for temporal compression -- reducing the time people take to listen to a recording while still extracting critical information. We first describe an exploratory study that identifies novel excision techniques that remove unimportant words or utterances from the recording. We then develop a new method for evaluating how well temporal compression supports users in forming a general understanding of a recording. Applying this method, we demonstrate that excision techniques are generally more effective than standard compression techniques that simply speed up the entire recording.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Bellotti, Victoria and Gwizdka, Jacek (2006): Email in personal information management. In Communications of the ACM, 49 (1) pp. 68-73
» 2005 «
Wellner, Pierre, Flynn, Mike, Tucker, Simon and Whittaker, Steve (2005): A meeting browser evaluation test. In: Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems 2005. pp. 2021-2024. Available online
“We introduce a browser evaluation test (BET), and describe a trial run application of the test. BET is a method for assessing meeting browser performance using the number of observations of interest found in the minimum amount of time as the evaluation metric, where observations of interest are statements about a meeting collected by independent observers. The resulting speed and accuracy scores aim to be objective, comparable and repeatable.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Bellotti, Victoria and Moody, Paul (2005): Introduction to This Special Issue on Revisiting and Reinventing E-Mail. In Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1) pp. 1-9
Whittaker, Steve (2005): Supporting Collaborative Task Management in E-mail. In Human-Computer Interaction, 20 (1) pp. 49-88
“E-mail is one of the most successful computer applications ever developed. Despite its success, it is now dogged by numerous problems. Users complain about feeling overwhelmed by the volume of messages they receive, they have difficulties too in organizing and managing their e-mail data but, most importantly, they have problems in using e-mail to manage collaborative tasks (Bellotti, Ducheneaut, Howard, & Smith, 2003; Balter, 1998, 2000; Mackay, 1988; Whittaker, Jones, & Terveen, 2002a; Whittaker & Sidner, 1996). These require extended interaction with others for their definition and execution (Bellotti et al., 2003; Venolia, Gupta, Cadiz, & Dabbish, 2001; Whittaker & Sidner, 1996). As a result, users are often concurrently working on multiple outstanding tasks as they await responses from others concerning these tasks. This requires users to (a) create reminders, (b) identify messages that relate to the same task, and (c) combine information from these related messages. Currently, people try to use the e-mail inbox to do this but our data indicate it is ineffective for these purposes. Other recent approaches attempt to tackle Collaborative Task Management but we show that these offer at best only partial solutions. In contrast, we present two systems, TeleNotes and ContactMap, that directly address Collaborative Task Management. These are motivated by empirical research into paper-based and people-based task management strategies. We describe how our systems implement these different strategies and present evaluation data for each system in use. We contrast the success of these two approaches with earlier work and discuss outstanding design and theory problems arising from our research.”
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» 2004 «
Whittaker, Steve and Amento, Brian (2004): Semantic speech editing. In: Dykstra-Erickson, Elizabeth and Tscheligi, Manfred (eds.) Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria. pp. 527-534. Available online
“Editing speech data is currently time-consuming and error-prone. Speech editors rely on acoustic waveform representations, which force users to repeatedly sample the underlying speech to identify words and phrases to edit. Instead we developed a semantic editor that reduces the need for extensive sampling by providing access to meaning. The editor shows a time-aligned errorful transcript produced by applying automatic speech recognition (ASR) to the original speech. Users visually scan the words in the transcript to identify important phrases. They then edit the transcript directly using standard word processing 'cut and paste' operations, which extract the corresponding time-aligned speech. ASR errors mean that users must supplement what they read in the transcript by accessing the original speech. Even when there are transcript errors, however, the semantic representation still provides users with enough information to target what they edit and play, reducing the need for extensive sampling. A laboratory evaluation showed that semantic editing is more efficient than acoustic editing even when ASR is highly inaccurate.”
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Jones, Quentin, Grandhi, Sukeshini A., Whittaker, Steve, Chivakula, Keerti and Terveen, Loren (2004): Putting systems into place: a qualitative study of design requirements for location-aware community systems. In: Proceedings of ACM CSCW04 Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2004. pp. 202-211. Available online
“We present a conceptual framework for location-aware community systems and results from two studies of how socially-defined places influence people's information sharing and communication needs. The first study identified a relationship between people's familiarity with a place and their desire for either stable or dynamic place-related information. The second study explored the utility of various system features highlighted by our conceptual framework. It clarified the role of place information in informal social interaction; it also showed that people valued, and were willing to provide information such as ratings, comments, and event records relevant to a place. These preliminary findings have important implications for the design of location-aware community systems. In particular, they suggest that such systems must integrate information about places with data about users' personal routines and social relationships.”
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Jones, Quentin, Grandhi, Sukeshini A., Terveen, Loren and Whittaker, Steve (2004): People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places: The P3 Framework for Location-Based Community Systems. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 13 (3) pp. 249-282
“In this paper we examine an emerging class of systems that link People-to-People-to-Geographical-Places; we call these P3-Systems. Through analyzing the literature, we have identified four major P3-System design techniques: People-Centered systems that use either absolute user location (e.g. Active Badge) or user proximity (e.g. Hocman) and Place-Centered systems based on either a representation of peoples use of physical spaces (e.g. ActiveMap) or on a matching virtual space that enables online interaction linked to physical location (e.g. Geonotes). In addition, each feature can be instantiated synchronously or asynchronously. The P3-System framework organizes existing systems into meaningful categories and structures the design space for an interesting new class of potentially context-aware systems. Our discussion of the framework suggests new ways of understanding and addressing the privacy concerns associated with location aware community system and outlines additional socio-technical challenges and opportunities.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Jones, Quentin, Nardi, Bonnie A., Creech, Mike, Terveen, Loren, Isaacs, Ellen and Hainsworth, John (2004): ContactMap: Organizing communication in a social desktop. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 11 (4) pp. 445-471
“Modern work is a highly social process, offering many cues for people to organize communication and access information. Shared physical workplaces provide natural support for tasks such as (a) social reminding about communication commitments and keeping track of collaborators and friends, and (b) social data mining of local expertise for advice and information. However, many people now collaborate remotely using tools such as email and voicemail. Our field studies show that these tools do not provide the social cues needed for group work processes. In part, this is because the tools are organized around messages, rather than people. In response to this problem, we created ContactMap, a system that makes people the primary unit of interaction. ContactMap provides a structured social desktop representation of users' important contacts that directly supports social reminding and social data mining. We conducted an empirical evaluation of ContactMap, comparing it with traditional email systems, on tasks suggested by our fieldwork. Users performed better with ContactMap and preferred ContactMap for the majority of these tasks. We discuss future enhancements of our system and the implications of these results for future communication interfaces and for theories of mediated communication.”
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Walker, Marilyn A., Whittaker, Steve, Stent, Amanda, Maloor, Preetam, Moore, Johanna D., Johnston, Michael and Vasireddy, Gunaranjan (2004): Generation and evaluation of user tailored responses in multimodal dialogue. In Cognitive Science, 28 (5) pp. 811-840
» 2003 «
Whittaker, Steve (2003): Things to Talk About When Talking About Things. In Human-Computer Interaction, 18 (1) pp. 149-170
“This commentary reviews the existing research literature concerning support
for talking about objects in mediated communication, drawing three conclusions:
(a) speech alone is often sufficient for effective conversations; (b) visual
information about work objects is generally more valuable than visual
information about work participants; and (c) disjoint visual perspectives can
undermine communication processes. I then comment on the four articles in the
light of these observations, arguing that they broadly support these
observations. I discuss the paradoxical failure of current technologies to
support talk about objects, arguing that these need to be better integrated
with existing communication applications. I conclude by outlining a research
agenda for supporting talk about things, identifying outstanding theoretical,
empirical, and design issues.”
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Whittaker, Steve and Amento, Brian (2003): Seeing what your are hearing: Co-ordinating responses to trouble reports in network troubleshooting. In: Proceedings of the Eighth European Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work 2003. pp. 219-238.
Whittaker, Steve and Hirschberg, Julia (2003): Look or Listen: Discovering Effective Techniques for Accessing Speech Data. In: Proceedings of the HCI03 Conference on People and Computers XVII 2003. pp. 207-222.
» 2002 «
Whittaker, Steve, Hirschberg, Julia, Amento, Brian, Stark, Litza, Bacchiani, Michiel, Isenhour, Philip, Stead, Larry, Zamchick, Gary and Rosenberg, Aaron (2002): SCANMail: a voicemail interface that makes speech browsable, readable and searchable. In: Terveen, Loren (ed.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2002 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 20-25, 2002, Minneapolis, Minnesota. pp. 275-282.
Nardi, Bonnie A., Whittaker, Steve and Schwarz, Heinrich (2002): NetWORKers and their Activity in Intensional Networks. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 11 (1) pp. 205-242
“Through ethnographic research, we document the rise of personal social networks in the workplace, which we call intensional networks. Paradoxically, we find that the most fundamental unit of analysis for computer-supported cooperative work is not at the group level for many tasks and settings, but at the individual level as personal social networks come to be more and more important. Collective subjects are increasingly put together through the assemblage of people found through personal networks rather than being constituted as teams created through organizational planning and structuring. Teams are still important but they are not the centerpiece of labor management they once were, nor are they the chief resource for individual workers. We draw attention to the importance of networks as most CSCW system designs assume a team. We urge that designers take account of networks and the problems they present to workers.”
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Isaacs, Ellen, Walendowski, Alan, Whittaker, Steve, Schiano, Diane J. and Kamm, Candace (2002): The character, functions, and styles of instant messaging in the workplace. In: Churchill, Elizabeth F., McCarthy, Joe, Neuwirth, Christine and Rodden, Tom (eds.) Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. pp. 11-20. Available online
“Current perceptions of Instant Messaging (IM) use are based primarily on
self-report studies. We logged thousands of (mostly) workplace IM conversations
and evaluated their conversational characteristics and functions. Contrary to
prior research, we found that the primary use of workplace IM was for complex
work discussions. Only 28% of conversations were simple, single-purpose
interactions and only 31% were about scheduling or coordination. Moreover,
people rarely switched from IM to another medium when the conversation got
complex. We found evidence of two distinct styles of use. Heavy IM users and
frequent IM partners mainly used it to work together: to discuss a broad range
of topics via many fast-paced interactions per day, each with many short turns
and much threading and multitasking. Light users and infrequent pairs mainly
used IM to coordinate: for scheduling, via fewer conversations per day that
were shorter, slower-paced with less threading and multitasking.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Jones, Quentin and Terveen, Loren (2002): Contact management: identifying contacts to support long-term communication. In: Churchill, Elizabeth F., McCarthy, Joe, Neuwirth, Christine and Rodden, Tom (eds.) Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA. pp. 216-225. Available online
“Much of our daily communication activity involves managing interpersonal
communications and relationships. Despite its importance, this activity of
contact management is poorly understood. We report on field and lab studies
that begin to illuminate it. A field study of business professionals confirmed
the importance of contact management and revealed a major difficulty: selecting
important contacts from the large set of people with whom one communicates.
These interviews also showed that communication history is a key resource for
this task. Informants identified several history-based criteria that they
considered useful.We conducted a lab study to test how well these criteria
predict contact importance. Subjects identified important contacts from their
email archives. We then analyzed their email to extract features for all
contacts. Reciprocity, recency and longevity of email interaction proved to be
strong predictors of contact importance. The experiment also identified another
contact management problem: removing 'stale' contacts from long term archives.
We discuss the design and theoretical implications of these results.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Jones, Quentin and Terveen, Loren (2002): Managing Long Term Communications: Conversation and Contact Management. In: HICSS 2002 2002. p. 115. Available online
Nardi, Bonnie A., Whittaker, Steve, Isaacs, Ellen, Creech, Mike, Johnson, Jeff A. and Hainsworth, John (2002): Integrating communication and information through ContactMap. In Communications of the ACM, 45 (4) pp. 89-95
» 2001 «
Whittaker, Steve and Hirschberg, Julia (2001): Research alerts: the character, value, and management of personal paper archives. In Interactions, 8 (4) pp. 11-16
Whittaker, Steve and Hirschberg, Julia (2001): The character, value, and management of personal paper archives. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 8 (2) pp. 150-170
“We explored general issues concerning personal information management by investigating the characteristics of office workers' paper-based information, in an industrial research environment. we examined the reasons people collect paper, types of data they collect, problems encountered in handling paper, and strategies used for processing it. We tested three specific hypotheses in the course of an office move. The greater availability of public digital data along with changes in people's jobs or interests should lead to wholescale discarding of paper data, while preparing for the move. Instead we found workers kept large, highly valued paper archives. We also expected that the major part of people's personal archives would be unique documents. However, only 49% of people's archives were unique documents, the remainder being copies of publicly available data and unread information, and we explore reasons for this. We examined the effects of paper-processing strategies on archive structure. We discovered different paper-processing strategies (filing and piling) that were relatively independent of job type. We predicated that filers' attempted to evaluate and categorize incoming documents would produce smaller archives that were accessed frequently. Contrary to our predictions, filers amassed more information, and accessed it less frequently than pilers. We argue that filers may engage in premature filing: to clear their workspace, they archives information that later turns out to be of low value. Given the effort involved in organizing data, they are also loath to discard filed information, even when its value is uncertain. We discuss the implications of this research for digital personal information management.”
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» 2000 «
Kellogg, Wendy A. and Whittaker, Steve (eds.) Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States.
Whittaker, Steve, Davis, Richard, Hirschberg, Julia and Muller, Urs (2000): Jotmail: A Voicemail Interface that Enables You to See what was Said. In: Turner, Thea, Szwillus, Gerd, Czerwinski, Mary, Peterno, Fabio and Pemberton, Steven (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 2000 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 1-6, 2000, The Hague, The Netherlands. pp. 89-96. Available online
“Voicemail is a pervasive, but under-researched tool for workplace communication. Despite potential advantages of voicemail over email, current phone-based voicemail UIs are highly problematic for users. We present a novel, Web-based, voicemail interface, Jotmail. The design was based on data from several studies of voicemail tasks and user strategies. The GUI has two main elements: (a) personal annotations that serve as a visual analogue to underlying speech; (b) automatically derived message header information. We evaluated Jotmail in an 8-week field trial, where people used it as their only means for accessing voicemail. Jotmail was successful in supporting most key voicemail tasks, although users' electronic annotation and archiving behaviors were different from our initial predictions. Our results argue for the utility of a combination of annotation based indexing and automatically derived information, as a general technique for accessing speech archives.”
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Nardi, Bonnie A., Whittaker, Steve and Bradner, Erin (2000): Interaction and Outeraction: Instant Messaging in Action. In: Kellogg, Wendy A. and Whittaker, Steve (eds.) Proceedings of the 2000 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work 2000, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. pp. 79-88. Available online
“We discuss findings from an ethnographic study of instant messaging (IM) in the workplace and its implications for media theory. We describe how instant messaging supports a variety of informal communication tasks. We document the affordances of IM that support flexible, expressive communication. We describe some unexpected uses of IM that highlight aspects of communication which are not part of current media theorizing. They pertain to communicative processes people use to connect with each other and to manage communication, rather than to information exchange. We call these processes "outeraction". We discuss how outeractional aspects of communication affect media choice and patterns of media use.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Terveen, Loren and Nardi, Bonnie A. (2000): Let's Stop Pushing the Envelope and Start Addressing It: A Reference Task Agenda for HCI. In Human-Computer Interaction, 15 (2) pp. 75-106
“We identify a problem with the process of research in the human-computer interaction (HCI) community-an overemphasis on "radical invention" at the price of achieving a common research focus. Without such a focus, it is difficult to build on previous work, to compare different interaction techniques objectively, and to make progress in developing theory. These problems at the research level have implications for practice, too; as researchers we often are unable to give principled design advice to builders of new systems. We propose that the HCI community try to achieve a common focus around the notion of reference tasks. We offer arguments for the advantages of this approach as well as consider potential difficulties. We explain how reference tasks have been highly effective in focusing research into information retrieval and speech recognition. We discuss what factors have to be considered in selecting HCI reference tasks and present an example reference task (for searching speech archives). This example illustrates the nature of reference tasks and points to the issues and problems involved in constructing and using them. We conclude with recommendations about what steps need to be taken to execute the reference task research agenda. This involves recommendations about both the technical research that needs to be done and changes in the way that the HCI research community operates. The technical research involves identification of important user tasks by systematic requirements gathering, definition and operationalization of reference tasks and evaluation metrics, and execution of task-based evaluation, along with judicious use of field trials. Perhaps more important, we have also suggested changes in community practice that HCI must adopt to make the reference tasks idea work. We must create forums for discussion of common tasks and methods by which people can compare systems and techniques. Only by doing this can the notion of reference tasks be integrated into the process of research and development, enabling the field to achieve the focus it desperately needs.”
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Nardi, Bonnie A., Whittaker, Steve and Schwarz, Heinrich (2000): It's Not What You Know, It's Who You Know: Work in the Information Age. In First Monday, 5 (5)
» 1999 «
Whittaker, Steve and Schwarz, Heinrich (1999): Meetings of the Board: The Impact of Scheduling Medium on Long Term Group Coordination in Software Development. In Computer Supported Cooperative Work, 8 (3) pp. 175-205
“Despite a wealth of electronic group tools for coordinating the software development process, instead we find technologically adept groups preferring to use what seem to be outmoded "material" tools in critical projects. The current ethnographic study investigates this apparent paradox. We begin by building up a detailed picture of the overall software development process and identify critical general problems in achieving coordination. Coordination problems arise in software development not only because of the complex dependencies that hold among the work of different individuals, but also for social and motivational reasons. We identify the central role of the schedule as a coordination device, but find that its value can be undermined because the schedule is often neither accurate, current nor credible. As a result, the schedule is not used as a resource for individual or group planning. We then compare coordination in two development groups, one using electronic and the other material scheduling tools. We found that the medium of the schedule has a major impact on coordination problems. The size, public location and physical qualities of material tools engender certain crucial group processes that current electronic technologies fail to support. A large wallboard located in a public area encouraged greater responsibility, commitment and updating and its material properties served to encourage more reflective planning. As a result the wallboard schedule was both accurate and current. Furthermore, the public nature of the wallboard promoted group interaction around the board, it enabled collaborative problem solving, as well as informing individuals about the local and global progress of the project. Despite these benefits, however, the material tool fell short on several other dimensions such as distribution, complex dependency tracking, and versioning. We make design recommendations about how the benefits of material tools could be incorporated into electronic groupware systems and discuss the theoretical implications of this work.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Hirschberg, Julia, Choi, John, Hindle, Don, Pereira, Fernando and Singhal, Amit (1999): SCAN: Designing and Evaluating User Interfaces to Support Retrieval from Speech Archives. In: Proceedings of the 22nd Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval 1999. pp. 26-33. Available online
» 1998 «
Whittaker, Steve, Terveen, Loren, Hill, Will and Cherny, Lynn (1998): The Dynamics of Mass Interaction. In: Poltrock, Steven and Grudin, Jonathan (eds.) Proceedings of the 1998 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 14 - 18, 1998, Seattle, Washington, United States. pp. 257-264. Available online
“Usenet may be regarded as the world's largest conversational application, with over 17,000 newsgroups and 3 million users. Despite its ubiquity and popularity, however, we know little about the nature of the interactions it supports. This empirical paper investigates mass interaction in Usenet. We analyse over 2.15 million messages from 659,450 posters, collected from 500 newsgroups over 6 months. We first characterise mass interaction, presenting basic data about demographics, conversational strategies and interactivity. Using predictions from the common ground model of interaction, we next conduct causal modelling to determine relations between demographics, conversational strategies and interactivity. We find evidence for moderate conversational threading, but large participation inequalities in Usenet, with a small minority of participants posting a large proportion of messages. Contrary to the common ground model and "Netiquette" guidelines, we also find that "cross-posting" to external newsgroups is highly frequent. Our predictions about the effects of demographics on conversational strategy were largely confirmed, but we found disconfirming evidence about the relations between conversational strategy and interactivity. Contrary to our expectations, both cross-posting and short messages promote interactivity. We conclude that in order to explain mass interaction, the common ground model must be modified to incorporate notions of weak ties and communication overload.”
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» 1997 «
Whittaker, Steve, Swanson, Jerry, Kucan, Jakov and Sidner, Candy (1997): TeleNotes: Managing Lightweight Interactions in the Desktop. In ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 4 (2) pp. 137-168
“Communication theories and technology have tended to focus on extended, formal meetings and have neglected a prevalent and vital form of workplace communication -- namely, light-weight communication. Unlike formal, extended meetings, lightweight interaction is brief, informal, unplanned, and intermittent. We analyze naturalistic data from a study of workplace communication and derive five design criteria for lightweight interaction systems. These criteria require that systems for lightweight interaction support conversational tracking, rapid connection, the ability to leave a message, context management, and shared real-time objects. Using these criteria, we evaluate existing interpersonal communications technologies. We then describe an implementation of a system (TeleNotes) that is designed to support lightweight interaction by meeting these criteria. The interface metaphor allows communications to be based around desktop objects, resembling "sticky notes." These objects are also organized into "desktop piles" to support conversational threads and provide mechanisms for initiating real-time audio, video, and application sharing. We conducted informal user testing of several system prototypes. Based on our findings, outstanding issues concerning theory and systems design for communication systems are outlined -- in particular, with regard to the issue of managing conversations over time.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Isaacs, Ellen and O'Day, Vicki (1997): Widening the Net: Workshop Report on the Theory and Practice of Physical and Network Communities. In ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, 29 (3) pp. 27-30
» 1996 «
Whittaker, Steve and Sidner, Candace (1996): Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email. In: Tauber, Michael J., Bellotti, Victoria, Jeffries, Robin, Mackinlay, Jock D. and Nielsen, Jakob (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 96 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 14-18, 1996, Vancouver, Canada. pp. 276-283. Available online
“Email is one of the most successful computer applications yet devised. Our empirical data show however, that although email was originally designed as a communications application, it is now being used for additional functions, that it was not designed for, such as task management and personal archiving. We call this email overload. We demonstrate that email overload creates problems for personal information management: users often have cluttered inboxes containing hundreds of messages, including outstanding tasks, partially read documents and conversational threads. Furthermore, user attempts to rationalise their inboxes by filing are often unsuccessful, with the consequence that important messages get overlooked, or "lost" in archives. We explain how email overloading arises and propose technical solutions to the problem.”
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Whittaker, Steve (1996): Talking to Strangers: An Evaluation of the Factors Affecting Electronic Collaboration. In: Olson, Gary M., Olson, Judith S. and Ackerman, Mark S. (eds.) Proceedings of the 1996 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work November 16 - 20, 1996, Boston, Massachusetts, United States. pp. 409-418. Available online
“This empirical study examines factors influencing the success of a commercial groupware system in creating group archives and supporting asynchronous communication. The study investigates the use of Lotus Notes in a workplace setting. We interviewed 21 Notes users and identified three factors that they thought contributed to the successful use of Notes databases for archiving and communication. We then tested the effect of these factors on 15,571 documents in 20 different databases. Contrary to our users' beliefs, we found the presence of an active database moderator actually inhibited discussions, and reduced browsing. Further paradoxical results were that conversations and the creation of group archives were more successful in databases with large numbers of diverse participants. Conversations and archiving were less successful in smaller, more homogeneous, project teams. Database size was also important: a large database containing huge amounts of information was more likely to be used for further conversations and archiving, than a small one. This result again ran counter to users' beliefs that small databases are superior. We discuss possible reasons for these findings in terms of critical mass and media competition and conclude with implications for design.”
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» 1995 «
Whittaker, Steve and Schwarz, Heinrich (1995): Back to the Future: Pen and Paper Technology Supports Complex Group Coordination. In: Katz, Irvin R., Mack, Robert L., Marks, Linn, Rosson, Mary Beth and Nielsen, Jakob (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 95 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference May 7-11, 1995, Denver, Colorado. pp. 495-502. Available online
“Despite a wealth of electronic group tools for co-ordinating the software development process, instead we find many groups choosing apparently outmoded "material" tools in critical projects. To understand the limitations of current electronic tools, we studied two groups, contrasting the effectiveness of both kinds of tools. We show that the size, public location and physical qualities of material tools engender certain crucial group processes that current on-line technologies fail to support. A large wallboard located in a public area promoted group interaction around the board, it enabled collaborative problem solving, as well as informing individuals about the local and global progress of the project. Furthermore, the public nature of the wallboard encouraged greater commitment and updating. However, material tools fall short on several other dimensions such as distribution, complex dependency tracking, and versioning. We believe that some of the benefits of material tools should be incorporated into electronic systems and suggest design alternatives that could bring these benefits to electronic systems.”
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Whittaker, Steve (1995): Rethinking Video as a Technology for Interpersonal Communications: Theory and Design Implications. In International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 42 (5) pp. 501-529
“This paper re-assesses the role of real-time video as a technology to support interpersonal communications at distance. We review three distinct hypotheses about the role of video in the coordination of conversational content and process. For each hypothesis, we identify design implications and outstanding research questions derived from current findings. We first evaluate the non-verbal communication hypothesis, namely the prevailing assumption that the role of video is to supplement speech, and embodied in applications such as videoconferencing and videophone. We conclude that previous work has overestimated the importance of video at the expense of audio. This finding has strong implications for the implementation of such systems, and we make recommendations about both synchronization and bandwidth allocation. Furthermore our own recent studies of workplace interactions point to other communicative functions of video. Current systems have neglected another potentially vital role of visual information in supporting the process of achieving opportunistic connection. Rather than providing a supplement to audio information, video is used to assess the communication availability of others. Visual information therefore promotes the types of remote opportunistic communications that are prevalent in face-to-face settings. We discuss early experiments with such connection applications and identify outstanding design and implementation issues. Finally we discuss another novel application of video " video-as-data". Here the video image is used to transmit information about the work objects themselves, rather than information about interactants, creating a dynamic shared workspace, and simulating a shared physical environment. In conclusion we suggest that research move away from an exclusive focus on non-verbal communication, and begin to investigate these other uses of real-time video.”
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» 1994 «
Whittaker, Steve, Hyland, Patrick and Wiley, Myrtle (1994): Filochat: Handwritten Notes Provide Access to Recorded Conversations. In: Adelson, Beth, Dumais, Susan and Olson, Judith S. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 94 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 24-28, 1994, Boston, Massachusetts. pp. 271-277. Available online
“We present a novel application which integrates handwriting and recorded audio in a semi-portable device: It allows users to straightforwardly access particular points in recorded spontaneous speech via handwritten notes using temporal indexing. Initial interviews with 23 users and 28 non-users of office audio showed a requirement for supplementing handwritten meeting notes with a verbatim speech record of the conversation, as well as problems in accessing particular points in long audio recordings. On the basis of this, we built a prototype system that combined co-indexed handwritten notes and recorded audio in a digital notebook. The prototype was tested on 67 users in field and laboratory trials. Laboratory studies showed objective benefits of combined notes and audio over notes alone. The utility of the access method was shown by improved performance over current audio technology such as dictaphones. We also found perceived benefits of higher quality meeting minutes in field trials. An unforeseen benefit was the use of this device as an audio editing tool. We discuss further technical extensions and user issues in relation to the prototype.”
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Nardi, Bonnie A., Bly, Sara A., Isaacs, Ellen, Wei, Sha Xin and Whittaker, Steve (1994): Collaborative Multimedia: Getting Beyond the Obvious (Panel). In: ACM Multimedia 1994 1994. pp. 119-120.
» 1993 «
Nardi, Bonnie A., Schwarz, Heinrich, Kuchinsky, Allan, Leichner, Robert, Whittaker, Steve and Sclabassi, Robert (1993): Turning Away from Talking Heads: The Use of Video-as-Data in Neurosurgery. In: Ashlund, Stacey, Mullet, Kevin, Henderson, Austin, Hollnagel, Erik and White, Ted (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 93 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 24-29, 1993, Amsterdam, The Netherlands. pp. 327-334. Available online
“Studies of video as a support for collaborative work have provided little hard evidence of its utility for either task performance or fostering telepresence, i.e. the conveyance of a face-to-face like social presence for remotely located participants. To date, most research on the value of video has concentrated on "talking heads" video in which the video images are of remote participants conferring or performing some task together. In contrast to talking heads video, we studied video-as-data in which video images of the workspace and work objects are the focus of interest, and convey critical information about the work. The use of video-as-data is intended to enhance task performance, rather than to provide telepresence. We studied the use of video during neurosurgery within the operating room and at remote locations away from the operating room. The workspace shown in the video is the surgical field (brain or spine) that the surgeon is operating on. We discuss our findings on the use of live and recorded video, and suggest extensions to video-as-data including its integration with computerized time-based information sources to educate and co-ordinate complex actions among distributed workgroups.”
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O'Conaill, Brid, Whittaker, Steve and Wilbur, Sylvia (1993): Conversations Over Video Conferences: An Evaluation of the Spoken Aspects of Video-Mediated Communication. In Human-Computer Interaction, 8 (4) pp. 389-428
“Recent trends toward telecommuting, mobile work, and wider distribution of the work force, combined with reduced technology costs, have made video communications more attractive as a means of supporting informal remote interaction. In the past, however, video communications have never gained widespread acceptance. Here we identify possible reasons for this by examining how the spoken characteristics of video-mediated communication differ from face-to-face interaction, for a series of real meetings. We evaluate two wide-area systems. One uses readily available Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) lines but suffers the limitations of transmission lags, a half-duplex line, and poor quality video. The other uses optical transmission and video-switching technology with negligible delays, full duplex audio, and broadcast quality video To analyze the effects of video systems on conversation, we begin with a series of conversational characteristics that have been shown to be important in face-to-face interaction. We identify properties of the communication channel in face-to-face interaction that are necessary to support these characteristics, namely, that it has low transmission lags, it is two way, and it uses multiple modalities. We compare these channel properties with those of the two video-conferencing systems and predict how their different channel properties will affect spoken conversation. As expected, when compared with face-to-face interaction, communication using the ISDN system was found to have longer conversational turns; fewer interruptions, overlaps, and backchannels; and increased formality when switching speakers. Communication over the system with broadcast quality audio and video was more similar to face-to-face meetings, although it did not replicate face-to-face interaction. Contrary to our expectations, formal techniques were still used to achieve speaker switching. We suggest that these may be necessary because of the absence of certain speaker-switching cues. The results imply that the advent of high-speed multimedia networking will improve but not remove all the problems of video conferencing as an interpersonal communications tool, and we describe possible solutions to the outstanding problems.”
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Whittaker, Steve, Geelhoed, Erik and Robinson, Elizabeth (1993): Shared Workspaces: How Do They Work and When Are They Useful?. In International Journal of Man-Machine Studies, 39 (5) pp. 813-842
“We investigated the effect on synchronous communication of adding a Shared Workspace to audio, for three tasks possessing key representative features of workplace activity. We examined the content and effectiveness of remote audio communication between pairs of participants, who worked with and without the addition of the Workspace. For an undemanding task requiring the joint production of brief textual summaries, we found no benefits associated with adding the Workspace. For a more demanding text editing task, the Workspace initially hampered performance but, with task practice, participants performed more efficiently than with audio alone. When the task was graphical design, the Workspace was associated with greater communication efficiency and also changed the nature of communication. The Workspace permits the straightforward expression of spatial relations and locations, gesturing, and the monitoring and coordination of activity by direct visual inspection. The results suggest that, for demanding text-based tasks, or for complex graphical tasks, there are overall benefits in adding a visual channel in the form of a Workspace. These benefits occur despite the costs involved in attempting to coordinate activity with this unfamiliar form of communication. Our findings provide evidence for early claims about putative Workspace benefits. We also interpret these results in the context of a theory of mediated communication.”
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» 1991 «
Whittaker, Steve, Brennan, Susan and Clark, Herbert H. (1991): Co-Ordinating Activity: An Analysis of Interaction in Computer-Supported Co-Operative Work. In: Robertson, Scott P., Olson, Gary M. and Olson, Judith S. (eds.) Proceedings of the ACM CHI 91 Human Factors in Computing Systems Conference April 28 - June 5, 1991, New Orleans, Louisiana. pp. 361-367. Available online
“We examined mediated communication using a shared electronic Whiteboard with and without the addition of a speech channel. The 3 users were not co-present. There were two major findings: (a) permanent media such as the Whiteboard enable users to construct shared data structures around which to organise their activity, and (b) this permanence allows users to abandon some (but not all) of the turn-taking commonly used in spoken conversation and to organise their activities in a highly parallel manner. With the addition of a speech channel, people still used the Whiteboard to construct shared data structures that make up the CONTENT of these communications, while speech was used for coordinating the PROCESS of communication.”
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Mar 19th, 2010
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