Interaction histories

The quantity and diversity of digital information that we produce, receive and download on a daily basis is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. As a member of the Micromégas project, I got interested in developing methodologies and tools to better understand how users manage their documents and applications, and to design new metaphors and interaction techniques to facilitate these tasks. I got more particularly interested in the problem of the automatic capture of qualitative and quantitative information about a users' computing activity.

Members of the Micromégas project have implemented a series of applications to monitor and visualize computing tasks [1, 2, 3, 4]. The interaction histories provided by these applications helped us better understand user activities. We also investigated ways in which they could be used by the users themselves to review previous work, return to a previous state, re-execute complex commands or send them to another person for example. A notable outcome of this work is PageLinker [5], a Firefox extension that significantly reduces pageloads and time spent on Web navigation tasks.

References

[1] N. Roussel, J-D. Fekete and M. Langet. Vers l'utilisation de la mémoire épisodique pour la gestion de données familières. In Proceedings of IHM 2005, 17ème conférence francophone sur l'Interaction Homme-Machine, pages 247-250, Septembre 2005. ACM, International Conference Proceedings Series. [ACM] [Google]

[2] O. Chapuis. Gestion des fenêtres : enregistrement et visualisation de l'interaction. In Proceedings of IHM 2005, 17ème conférence francophone sur l'Interaction Homme-Machine, pages 255-258, September 2005. ACM. [ACM] [Google]

[3] A. Tabard. Conception d'un navigateur web spécifique pour la bio-informatique. Rapport de stage de Master, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, Paris 6, Septembre 2005. 67 pages. [Google]

[4] N. Roussel, A. Tabard and C. Letondal. All you need is log. Position paper, WWW 2006 Workshop on Logging Traces of Web Activity: The Mechanics of Data Collection, May 2006. 4 pages. [Google]

[5] A. Tabard, W. Mackay, N. Roussel and C. Letondal. PageLinker: Integrating Contextual Bookmarks into a Browser. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, pages 337–346, April 2007. ACM. [ACM] [Google]