A Framework for Specifying and Monitoring User Tasks

Bailey, Brian P.; Adamczyk, Piotr D.; Chang, Tony Y.; Chilson, Neil A.

Permalink

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/11015 Copy

Description

Title

A Framework for Specifying and Monitoring User Tasks

Author(s)

• Bailey, Brian P.
• Adamczyk, Piotr D.
• Chang, Tony Y.
• Chilson, Neil A.

Issue Date

2005-04

Keyword(s)

Human-computer interaction

Abstract

Interrupting users engaged in tasks typically has negative effects on their task completion time, error rate, and affective state. Empirical research has shown that these negative effects can be mitigated by deferring interruptions until more opportune moments in a user's task sequence. However, existing systems that reason about when to interrupt do not have access to task models that would allow for such finer-grained temporal reasoning. To enable this reasoning, we have developed an integrated framework for specifying and monitoring user tasks. For task specification, our framework provides a language that supports expressive specification of tasks using a concise notation. For task monitoring, our framework provides an event database and handler that manages events from any instrumented application and a task monitor that observes a user's progress through specified tasks. We describe the design and implementation of our framework, showing how it can be used to specify and monitor practical, representative user tasks. We also report results from two user studies measuring the effectiveness of our existing implementation. The use of our framework will enable attention aware systems to consider a user's position in a task when reasoning about when to interrupt.

Type of Resource

text

Permalink

http://hdl.handle.net/2142/11015

Copyright and License Information

You are granted permission for the non-commercial reproduction, distribution, display, and performance of this technical report in any format, BUT this permission is only for a period of 45 (forty-five) days from the most recent time that you verified that this technical report is still available from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Computer Science Department under terms that include this permission. All other rights are reserved by the author(s).

Owning Collections