achieving more personal computing
My research focuses on personal information tools, and how they could be better designed to support individuals' needs through a better understanding of people, their lives and situations. My approach has been a mix of three efforts: primary work on understanding users and how they use existing tools to manage information, user modeling work on learning and representing individuals' characteristics, and the design of interfaces and applications that take advantage of these models.
Studies of how people capture, keep, organize and use information in everyday practice. We sought to uncover reasons why today's tools often fail and to identify how future tools might support users to avoid such failures.
infoscraps study (june 2007) - Interview/artifact study of "orphaned" personal information and how it is managed, why it is created and how tools can serve it.
list.it study (aug 2008) - Field deployment study of a note-taking tool to examine how people capture, retrieve and use notes they take for themselves.
The following personal applications demonstrate the potential for future apps to work better for us once they know more about us:
personal automation (atomsmasher) - a programmable web-based "assistant" that does stuff for you. Uses data from the Web and PLUM to drive context-adaptive reactive behaviors.
jourknow and list.it - Tools for helping us keep track of our personal information by making it easier to write down, organize and use laterinky and input understanding - interfaces for faster, more accurate expression of information to your computer.
PLUM (Personal Lifetime User Modeling) - A privacy-centric toolkit for capturing activity data people generate on their desktops, integrating information from the web, and representing this information in useful ways to applications and users. PLUM represents users tasks, activity rhythms, interests, friends, and chronological and physical environments.
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