Abstract
This paper describes Wells, a prototype information appliance that
supports communication, information exchange and information management
between co-workers. The appliance is particularly targeted on the requirements
of the relationship between managers and their assistants. Wells aims to
integrate and coordinate a range of information devices such as phones, faxes,
and email and incorporate it with diary-based information. In more general
terms, Wells provides an opportunity to explore the issues of personal
information management and the design of interfaces to appliances to support
these activities [1].
Keywords
Information appliances; metaphors; intelligent systems; information
management; time management; office applications.
Introduction
The motivation for the project described in this short paper comes from our
observations that communication, the management of information and the
scheduling of time are inextricably interlinked and central to the working
relationship between individuals. In particular, the relationship between
managers and their assistants is based on the smooth management of
communication, information exchange and time-management. This is an area
where there is little in the way of coordinated technology support, and whilst
there are many examples of productivity software (such as shared diaries or
voicemail systems for example) both the information management processes
that they support, and the user interfaces to them, are essentially ad hoc
designs, based on little understanding of the complexity of the tasks to be
supported. We suggest that a great deal of leverage in understanding
information management and technology to support it can be obtained by
focusing on the relationship between, for example, a manager and assistant and
developing specific appliances to support it. Such studies and designs are then
generalisable to the broad issues in personal information management.
MANAGING COMMUNICATION, INFORMATION AND TIME
Information can come from diverse sources: face-to-face interaction with co-
workers, from interactive devices such as telephones or from non-interactive
media such as fax, email, letter and memo.
In the case of the manager-assistant relationship, one part of an
assistant's work
is to perform some filtering on the information: to prioritise items for
consideration, and to directly deal with those tasks which are delegated to the
assistant. One difficulty in performing this filtering role is the overhead
that can
arise in the low-level process of information manipulation. Figure 1 shows a
typical office desk, with several information sources. The focus created by
this
converge of different technologies is on the mode of communication, and a
great deal of the workload here is merely the transcription of information from
one mode to another.
FIGURE 1: A typical desk with a range of
technologies. How easy is it to manage information from these diverse
modalities?
A significant technology development in supporting the manager/assistant
relationship would be the integration of access to a variety of information
sources (phone, fax, email) in one appliance. This would mean that various
information sources could be integrated with one unified interface, but
could be
developed to support a variety of interface modes. The Wells device aims
to achieve this.
WELLS: DESIGN RATIONALE
Wells is an information management device which assists users in the
management of information and information technologies in office settings. It
consists of a small gesture, voice and pen-enabled LCD colour display and
associated technology which manages telephone, fax, and email and allows a
user to indicate their availability status in a time-management system.
Pairs of
Wells devices allow users to indicate their availability,
interruptability
and unavailability to interruption and therefore represent an enhancement of
traditional network-based diaries or schedulers. The Wells user can
indicate, via a pen-based interface, their current status: red
(uninterruptable),
orange (potentially interruptable) or green (interruptable). During red
periods,
telephony, fax, email and other appliances are routed to the user's assistant.
This user has a Wells device which indicates the manager's current
status
and is informed, via visual displays and sound and voice messages, of the
manager's current status and that their own Wells device will be
managing incoming information for that period. Similarly, when the manager is
using an information service - such as making an international telephone call
for example - their Wells will block other incoming information and
indicate to partner devices that the user is in red time. Wells also
allows
for ad hoc scheduling by primary and other users without the need to indicate
the exact nature of the activity, by simply using the pen-based interface
to block
out a period of time as red, orange or green.
Wells is an extension of traditional time-management systems, and in
particular network-based schedulers which are sometimes unsuccessful in that
they force users into levels of precision and information management which
they often find uncomfortable. For example, most network-based schedulers
require specific text entries to be provided for activities. Additionally, such
systems make the implicit assumption that time-management is an activity
which exists in a vacuum unconnected to the many social and organisational ad
hoc interactions and activities which characterise all individuals' work in
organisations. Wells on the other hand is not intended to be an all-
encompassing technology for managing time for users, rather it is intended to
help individuals working together to manage information and the appliances
through which information is delivered to users. Wells' interface modes
are (1) voice activation and recognition and contains a restricted speaker-
independent keyword vocabulary (2) speech input - Wells can accept
and route short voice messages to other Wells devices and attach
snippets of speech to time periods blocked on the LCD screen; (3) pen -
Wells will accept gestures from a simple vocabulary of pen-based strokes
to e.g. block out periods of time (downward stroke through a time period) or
open up periods of time (lateral line through a time period); (4) gesture -
using
transducer technology Wells will accept simple gestures to activate and
deactivate, and to manipulate displays of time periods; (5) visual display -
Wells uses a colour-coded display of time which is user-tailorable for
time resolutions from minutes through hours and segments of days. Figure 2
shows an example of an early software prototype of a Wells interface.
The interface is being incrementally prototyped using both software and paper-
based prototypes, supported by interim evaluations and information from
ethnographic studies of the manager/assistant relationship. This screenshot
shows different information sources (such as phone and fax messages)
integrated through Wells.
FIGURE 2. An early Wells software
prototype
INTEGRATED INFORMATION APPLIANCES
The value of the Wells project is that it provides the opportunity to
explore a number of research themes such as (1) the human interface design
issues for visual displays of time and the use of colour, resolution, icons and
symbols (2) multimodal interface issues - integration of pen, voice, speech and
gesture (3) integration of information appliances - the ways in which networks
of ubiquitous computing devices can be managed (4) base technology issues in
developing a software architecture which can integrate and manage telephony,
fax, email and voicemail and other information appliances (5) social and
organisational issues - what impacts appliances such as Wells will have
on working practices and (6) the effectiveness and scope of intelligent network-
based agents.
The Wells project is also part of a larger research theme which concerns
the design and use of integrated personal information appliances - interactive
technologies which provide a high level of information utility for individual
users whilst supporting information activities within organisations, groups and
environments. The key feature of this approach is the integration of the
diverse
media necessary to support an individual's work. Our approach to providing
support for these personal information management activities is to develop
information appliances which provide (a) high levels of connectivity (b) a
narrow range of core information management functions (c) support for specific
users through information content and provision without personal ownership of
the appliance and which (d) serve as ways of locating individuals'
activities (as
opposed to individuals) within the larger social and organisational settings in
which they work. The underlying assumption is that computers can be used to
augment the real world. The advantages are that computers do not have to
reproduce the real world inside the machine, that novel appliances can trade
upon properties and objects in the real world which are well known, stable and
which embody a great deal of knowledge and effort by users, and that
appliances can be used to manage social [2] and informal [3] dimensions of
information management processes.
References
1. Thomas, P. J. and Meech J. F. (1994). Personal Information Management:
Applying HCI Techniques to Develop Usable Personal Technology.
Proceedings of HCI'94, Glasgow, August 1994.
2. Thomas, P. J. (1995) (ed.). Mobile Communication and Collaborative
Technology. (London: Alfred Waller/Unicom Seminars series).
3. Frohlich, D. (1995). Interpersonal information management. In Thomas, P. J.
(ed.). Mobile Communication and Collaborative Technology. (London:
Alfred Waller/Unicom Seminars series).
