mind the gap - exploring the void of the task counter
Alan Dix alan@hcibook.com www.hcibook.com/alan/
Position Paper - HCI2003 Workshop on the Temporal Aspects of Tasks.

Introduction

Issues concerning time in the user interface have been a recurrent theme in my research ever since my "Myth of the Infinitely Fast Machine" paper in 1987 [3]. In this paper I'm going to focus on those aspects concerned with the precise timing of tasks and in particular at a close examination of the gaps between tasks.

In work over several years with Devina Rambuny-Ellis and Julie Wilkinson, we have looked at the nature of this gap and in particular what makes tasks happen when they happen. We call this Trigger Analysis and a chapter describing it will appear in the new Diaper and Stanton task analysis collection [12,2]. In more recent work with Cristina Chisalita and Gerrit van der Veer, we have looked at the relationship between events and triggers in Trigger Analysis and similarly named concepts in Groupware Task Analysis [20,21]. In grappling with the similarities and differences between these we have been led to a more rich understanding of events and the way events drive and are driven by tasks. One outcome of this is a more detailed analysis of the gap between tasks and a resulting view of the life history of a task [11].

references and links

1. J. Bowers & J. Churcher (1988). Local and global structuring of computer mediated communication: developing linguistic perspectives on CSCW in COSMOS. CSCW'88 Proc. of the Conf. on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work, ACM, pp. 125-139.
2. D. Diaper & N. Stanton (Eds.) (2003). The Handbook of Task Analysis for Human-Computer Interaction. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates. (in press)
3. A. Dix, The myth of the infinitely fast machine, pages 215-228 in Proceedings of HCI'87: People and Computers III, D. Diaper and R. Winder (eds.), Cambridge University Press, 1987. (Also in A. J. Dix, Formal Methods for Interactive Systems, Academic Press, 1991.)
4. A. Dix (1991). Status and events: static and dynamic properties of interactive systems. Proceedings of the Eurographics Seminar: Formal Methods in Computer Graphics, Ed. D. A. Duce. Marina di Carrara, Italy.
5. A. Dix (1992). Pace and interaction, pages 193-207 in Proceedings of HCI'92: People and Computers VII, A. Monk, D. Diaper and M. Harrison (eds.), Cambridge University Press.
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7. A. Dix & G. Abowd (1996). Modelling status and event behaviour of interactive systems. Software Engineering Journal, 11 (6),. 334-346
8. A. Dix, D. Ramduny and J. Wilkinson (1998). Interaction in the Large. Interacting with Computers. 11(1): 9-32.
9. A. Dix (2002). Towards a Ubiquitous Semantics of Interaction: phenomenology, scenarios and traces. Interactive Systems. Design, Specification, and Verification 9th International Workshop, DSV-IS 2002. P. Forbrig, Q. Limbourg, B. Urban, J. Vanderdonckt (Eds.). Rostock, Germany, June 2002. Springer, LNCS 2545, pp. 238-252
10. A. Dix (2002). Managing the Ecology of Interaction. In Proceedings of Tamodia 2002 - First Intnl Workshop on Task Models and User Interface Design, Bucharest, Romania, 18-19 July 2002
11. A. Dix, C. Chisalita and G. van der Veer (2003). Moments of Significance - the meanings of event: enablement, initiation, completion. In Tamodia 2003, part of Universal Access in HCI, Volume 4 of Proceedings of HCI International 2003. C. Stephandis (ed.). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 2003. pp. 1519-1523
12. A. Dix, D. Ramduny-Ellis & J. Wilkinson (2003). Trigger Analysis - understanding broken tasks. In Diaper & Stanton (2003).
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16. S. Payne (1993), Understanding Calendar Use, Human-Computer Interaction, 8(2), pp. 83-100.
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18. K. Severinson Eklundh (1986). Dialogue Processes in Computer-Mediated Communication: A Study of Letters in the COM System, Linkoping Studies in Arts and Science. (excerpt from corpus referenced in Bowers and Churcher 1988)
19. A. Shepherd. Task analysis as a framework for examining HCI tasks, in Perspectives on HCI: Diverse Approaches, A. Monk and N. Gilbert, Editors. 1995, Academic Press: London. p. 145-174.
20. G. van der Veer & M. van Welie (2000). Task Based GroupWare Design: Putting theory into practice. In Proceedings of DIS 2000, New York, United States.
21. M. van Welie (2001). Task-Based User Interface Design. Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Sciences of the Vrije University of Amsterdam.