Tara Lynn Matthews | University of California, Berkeley (original) (raw)

Papers by Tara Lynn Matthews

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Tara Matthews is a computer scientist with interests in peripheral displays, glanceability, evalu... more Tara Matthews is a computer scientist with interests in peripheral displays, glanceability, evaluation, multitasking, accessibility, and ubiquitous computing; she is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Tye Rattenbury is a computer scientist with an interest in models of human behavior, particularly in applications of these models in work support systems; he is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Scott Carter is a computer scientist with interests in ubiquitous computing, peripheral displays, accessibility, and social media; he is a PhD candidate at ABSTRACT Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to balance multiple activities. However, peripheral display innovation and development has suffered because much of the past work has been technology-driven: there exists little theoretical understanding of how they operate in relation to people's everyday lives. In response to this, we present a framework for understanding, designing, and evaluating peripheral displays based on Activity Theory. We argue that peripheral displays are information displays that become unobtrusive to users. As this quality depends on the context of use, we present a framework for describing peripheral displays based on the number and types of activities they support. Furthermore, we argue that different types of displays require different approaches to evaluation. From our own work and a review of related literature we derive a set of general evaluation criteria for peripheral displays (appeal, learnability, awareness, effects of breakdowns, and distraction). We then describe approaches for evaluating these criteria for different types of peripheral displays and present a case study to illustrate the value of our Activity Theory evaluation framework in practice.

Over the past decade and a half, corporations and academies have invested considerable time and m... more Over the past decade and a half, corporations and academies have invested considerable time and money in the realization of ubiquitous computing. Yet design approaches that yield ecologically valid understandings of ubiquitous computing systems, which can help designers make design decisions based on how systems perform in the context of actual experience, remain rare. The central question underlying this paper is: what barriers stand in the way of real-world, ecologically valid design for ubicomp?

Sounds such as co-workers chatting nearby or a dripping faucet help us maintain awareness of and ... more Sounds such as co-workers chatting nearby or a dripping faucet help us maintain awareness of and respond to our surroundings. Without a tool that communicates ambient sounds in a nonauditory manner, maintaining this awareness is difficult for people who are deaf. We present an iterative investigation of peripheral, visual displays of ambient sounds. Our major contributions are: (1) a rich understanding of what ambient sounds are useful to people who are deaf, (2) a set of visual and functional requirements for a peripheral sound display, based on feedback from people who are deaf, (3) lab-based evaluations investigating the characteristics of four prototypes, and (4) a set of design guidelines for successful ambient audio displays, based on a comparison of four implemented prototypes and user feedback. Our work provides valuable information about the sound awareness needs of the deaf and can help to inform further design of such applications.

Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online processes. Many must be performed frequently ... more Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online processes. Many must be performed frequently and are tedious, while others are done less frequently yet are complex or hard to remember. We present interviews with knowledge workers that reveal a need for mechanisms to automate the execution of and to share knowledge about these processes. In response, we have developed the CoScripter system (formerly Koala [ 11]), a collaborative scripting environment for recording, automating, and sharing web-based processes. We have deployed CoScripter within a large corporation for more than 10 months. Through usage log analysis and interviews with users, we show that CoScripter has addressed many user automation and sharing needs, to the extent that more than 50 employees have voluntarily incorporated it into their work practice. We also present ways people have used CoScripter and general issues for tools that support automation and sharing of how-to knowledge. . First, we present results from an interview study that explores how people practice, learn, and share their procedural knowledge in the enterprise. Second, we present results from an extended deployment of an end-user programming system in a large organization. Finally, we discuss a number of general issues that arose in the deployment that must

Information workers often have to balance many tasks and interruptions. In this work, we explore ... more Information workers often have to balance many tasks and interruptions. In this work, we explore peripheral display techniques that improve multitasking efficiency by helping users maintain task flow, know when to resume tasks, and more easily reacquire tasks. Specifically, we compare two types of abstraction that provide different task information: semantic content extraction, which displays only the most relevant content in a window, and change detection, which signals when a change has occurred in a window (all designed as modifications to Scalable Fabric [17]). Results from our user study suggest that semantic content extraction improves multitasking performance more so than either change detection or our base case of scaling. Results also show that semantic content extraction provides significant benefits to task flow, resumption timing, and reacquisition. We discuss the implication of these findings on the design of peripheral interfaces that support multitasking.

Sounds constantly occur around us, keeping us aware of our surroundings. People who are deaf have... more Sounds constantly occur around us, keeping us aware of our surroundings. People who are deaf have difficulty maintaining an awareness of these ambient sounds. We present an investigation of peripheral, visual displays to help people who are deaf maintain an awareness of sounds in the environment. Our contribution is twofold. First, we present a set of visual design preferences and functional requirements for peripheral visualizations of nonspeech audio that will help improve future applications. Visual design preferences include ease of interpretation, glance-ability, and appropriate distractions. Functional requirements include the ability to identify what sound occurred, view a history of displayed sounds, customize the information that is shown, and determine the accuracy of displayed information. Second, we designed, implemented, and evaluated two fully functioning prototypes that embody these preferences and requirements, serving as examples for future designers and furthering progress toward understanding how to best provide peripheral audio awareness for the deaf.

Advances in location-enhanced technology are making it easier for us to be located by others. The... more Advances in location-enhanced technology are making it easier for us to be located by others. These new technologies present a difficult privacy tradeoff, as disclosing one's location to another person or service could be risky, yet valuable. To explore whether and what users are willing to disclose about their location to social relations, we conducted a three-phased formative study. Our results show that the most important factors were who was requesting, why the requester wanted the participant's location, and what level of detail would be most useful to the requester. After determining these, participants were typically willing to disclose either the most useful detail or nothing about their location. From our findings, we reflect on the decision process for location disclosure. With these results, we hope to influence the design of future locationenhanced applications and services.

Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to conventional displays and focused activi... more Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to conventional displays and focused activities. However, as displays become embedded throughout our environment and daily lives, increasing numbers of them must operate on the periphery of our attention. Peripheral displays can allow a person to be aware of information while she is attending to some other primary task or activity. We present the Peripheral Displays Toolkit (PTK), a toolkit that provides structured support for managing user attention in the development of peripheral displays. Our goal is to enable designers to explore different approaches to managing user attention. The PTK supports three issues specific to conveying information on the periphery of human attention. These issues are abstraction of raw input, rules for assigning notification levels to input, and transitions for updating a display when input arrives. Our contribution is the investigation of issues specific to attention in peripheral display design and a toolkit that encapsulates support for these issues. We describe our toolkit architecture and present five sample peripheral displays demonstrating our toolkit's capabilities.

One of the opportunities of ubiquitous computing is to provide information in new ways in our eve... more One of the opportunities of ubiquitous computing is to provide information in new ways in our everyday environments. In this paper we explore novel display opportunities in everyday situations with the design and study of the Hanger Display -a system for ambiently conveying information embedded in a wardrobe. We have built a working prototype of this display and explored it with users in a formative study. The results of the study show that this display is useful and appealing to people. Our experience creating and evaluating the Hanger Display also provided interesting insights for future work in embedding technology in everyday objects. In particular, we saw that such technology is beneficial because it provides information in places where it is useful, taking advantage of the established meaning of artifacts and places, and seamlessly supporting activities that occur in these places. In addition, we learned that such embodied interfaces could lead to new interaction possibilities, doing more than simply displaying peripheral information.

Tangible interfaces have the potential to support learning for non-expert users, ease 3D navigati... more Tangible interfaces have the potential to support learning for non-expert users, ease 3D navigation, and foster collaboration. We developed two physical devices aimed at school children for navigating a 3D virtual model of the human body. Results from a 40 subject user study suggest that these devices can encourage collaboration and improve the learnability of a navigational interface.

Given the difficult design challenge posed by mobile devices, the WebQuilt and Mobile Devices pro... more Given the difficult design challenge posed by mobile devices, the WebQuilt and Mobile Devices project involved extending WebQuilt [8], a Web site testing and analysis tool, to work with PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and Internet phones. This included background research regarding the principles of Human Computer Interaction and usability testing, understanding WebQuilt, and researching mobile technologies, mobile Web site design, and how to best serve mobile designers with WebQuilt. The necessary changes were implemented to allow for PDA proxying and visualization and similar changes were started for Internet phones. The project involved designing and building the framework for deploying the tests to mobile users, and running usability tests to gauge the effectiveness of WebQuilt for mobile devices. The tests showed that WebQuilt has potential for helping mobile Web site designers find usability problems.

In this paper we discuss a pilot usability study using wireless Internet-enabled personal digital... more In this paper we discuss a pilot usability study using wireless Internet-enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs). We compared usability data gathered in traditional lab studies with a proxy-based clickstream logging and analysis tool. We found that this remote testing technique can more easily gather many of the contentrelated usability issues, but device-related issues are more difficult to capture.

This paper describes the visual analysis tool WebQuilt, a web usability logging and visualization... more This paper describes the visual analysis tool WebQuilt, a web usability logging and visualization system that helps web design teams record and analyze usability tests. The logging portion of WebQuilt unobtrusively gathers clickstream data as users complete specified tasks. This data is then aggregated and presented as an interactive graph, where nodes of the graph are images of the web pages visited, and arrows are the transitions between pages. To aid analysis of the gathered usability test data, the WebQuilt visualization provides filtering capabilities and semantic zooming, allowing the designer to understand the test results at the gestalt view of the entire graph, and then drill down to sub-paths and single pages. The visualization highlights important usability issues, such as pages where users spent a lot of time, pages where users get off track during the task, navigation patterns, and exit pages, all within the context of a specific task. WebQuilt is designed to conduct remote usability testing on a variety of Internet-enabled devices and provide a way to identify potential usability problems when the tester cannot be present to observe and record user actions.

Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to multitask.... more Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to multitask. Increased knowledge on how to design and evaluate glanceable peripheral displays can lead to better support for multitasking. We will contribute a set of guidelines for designing glanceable peripheral displays, using the wealth of abstraction techniques (e.g., change detection, feature extraction), design variables (e.g., color, shape), and design characteristics (e.g., dimensionality, symbolism) available. We will contribute an evaluation framework that clearly defines peripheral displays, metrics for evaluating their success, and guidelines for selecting evaluation methods. These contributions will improve peripheral displays that enable users to manage multiple tasks through low-effort monitoring.

Peripheral displays are an important application for enabling people to be constantly aware of in... more Peripheral displays are an important application for enabling people to be constantly aware of information while doing other activities. How does one evaluate a peripheral awareness display to determine if it provides awareness without distracting the user inappropriately from other tasks? We explore evaluation metrics for peripheral displays and describe proposed support to be added to an existing toolkit for creating peripheral display prototypes.

Prototype: mobile tool provides text transcriptions of the last 30 seconds of audio, upon user re... more Prototype: mobile tool provides text transcriptions of the last 30 seconds of audio, upon user request The purpose of this project was to create a tool for people… [read] mobile remote: relay services (phone, video, IP) in-person: recognition (speech [IBM ViaVoice], sign language [Edwards '97]) nonmobile sound awareness communication A great deal of assistive technology has been created for the deaf, including support for •non-mobile communication:

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Tara Matthews is a computer scientist with interests in peripheral displays, glanceability, evalu... more Tara Matthews is a computer scientist with interests in peripheral displays, glanceability, evaluation, multitasking, accessibility, and ubiquitous computing; she is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Tye Rattenbury is a computer scientist with an interest in models of human behavior, particularly in applications of these models in work support systems; he is a PhD candidate at the University of California Berkeley. Scott Carter is a computer scientist with interests in ubiquitous computing, peripheral displays, accessibility, and social media; he is a PhD candidate at ABSTRACT Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to balance multiple activities. However, peripheral display innovation and development has suffered because much of the past work has been technology-driven: there exists little theoretical understanding of how they operate in relation to people's everyday lives. In response to this, we present a framework for understanding, designing, and evaluating peripheral displays based on Activity Theory. We argue that peripheral displays are information displays that become unobtrusive to users. As this quality depends on the context of use, we present a framework for describing peripheral displays based on the number and types of activities they support. Furthermore, we argue that different types of displays require different approaches to evaluation. From our own work and a review of related literature we derive a set of general evaluation criteria for peripheral displays (appeal, learnability, awareness, effects of breakdowns, and distraction). We then describe approaches for evaluating these criteria for different types of peripheral displays and present a case study to illustrate the value of our Activity Theory evaluation framework in practice.

Over the past decade and a half, corporations and academies have invested considerable time and m... more Over the past decade and a half, corporations and academies have invested considerable time and money in the realization of ubiquitous computing. Yet design approaches that yield ecologically valid understandings of ubiquitous computing systems, which can help designers make design decisions based on how systems perform in the context of actual experience, remain rare. The central question underlying this paper is: what barriers stand in the way of real-world, ecologically valid design for ubicomp?

Sounds such as co-workers chatting nearby or a dripping faucet help us maintain awareness of and ... more Sounds such as co-workers chatting nearby or a dripping faucet help us maintain awareness of and respond to our surroundings. Without a tool that communicates ambient sounds in a nonauditory manner, maintaining this awareness is difficult for people who are deaf. We present an iterative investigation of peripheral, visual displays of ambient sounds. Our major contributions are: (1) a rich understanding of what ambient sounds are useful to people who are deaf, (2) a set of visual and functional requirements for a peripheral sound display, based on feedback from people who are deaf, (3) lab-based evaluations investigating the characteristics of four prototypes, and (4) a set of design guidelines for successful ambient audio displays, based on a comparison of four implemented prototypes and user feedback. Our work provides valuable information about the sound awareness needs of the deaf and can help to inform further design of such applications.

Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online processes. Many must be performed frequently ... more Modern enterprises are replete with numerous online processes. Many must be performed frequently and are tedious, while others are done less frequently yet are complex or hard to remember. We present interviews with knowledge workers that reveal a need for mechanisms to automate the execution of and to share knowledge about these processes. In response, we have developed the CoScripter system (formerly Koala [ 11]), a collaborative scripting environment for recording, automating, and sharing web-based processes. We have deployed CoScripter within a large corporation for more than 10 months. Through usage log analysis and interviews with users, we show that CoScripter has addressed many user automation and sharing needs, to the extent that more than 50 employees have voluntarily incorporated it into their work practice. We also present ways people have used CoScripter and general issues for tools that support automation and sharing of how-to knowledge. . First, we present results from an interview study that explores how people practice, learn, and share their procedural knowledge in the enterprise. Second, we present results from an extended deployment of an end-user programming system in a large organization. Finally, we discuss a number of general issues that arose in the deployment that must

Information workers often have to balance many tasks and interruptions. In this work, we explore ... more Information workers often have to balance many tasks and interruptions. In this work, we explore peripheral display techniques that improve multitasking efficiency by helping users maintain task flow, know when to resume tasks, and more easily reacquire tasks. Specifically, we compare two types of abstraction that provide different task information: semantic content extraction, which displays only the most relevant content in a window, and change detection, which signals when a change has occurred in a window (all designed as modifications to Scalable Fabric [17]). Results from our user study suggest that semantic content extraction improves multitasking performance more so than either change detection or our base case of scaling. Results also show that semantic content extraction provides significant benefits to task flow, resumption timing, and reacquisition. We discuss the implication of these findings on the design of peripheral interfaces that support multitasking.

Sounds constantly occur around us, keeping us aware of our surroundings. People who are deaf have... more Sounds constantly occur around us, keeping us aware of our surroundings. People who are deaf have difficulty maintaining an awareness of these ambient sounds. We present an investigation of peripheral, visual displays to help people who are deaf maintain an awareness of sounds in the environment. Our contribution is twofold. First, we present a set of visual design preferences and functional requirements for peripheral visualizations of nonspeech audio that will help improve future applications. Visual design preferences include ease of interpretation, glance-ability, and appropriate distractions. Functional requirements include the ability to identify what sound occurred, view a history of displayed sounds, customize the information that is shown, and determine the accuracy of displayed information. Second, we designed, implemented, and evaluated two fully functioning prototypes that embody these preferences and requirements, serving as examples for future designers and furthering progress toward understanding how to best provide peripheral audio awareness for the deaf.

Advances in location-enhanced technology are making it easier for us to be located by others. The... more Advances in location-enhanced technology are making it easier for us to be located by others. These new technologies present a difficult privacy tradeoff, as disclosing one's location to another person or service could be risky, yet valuable. To explore whether and what users are willing to disclose about their location to social relations, we conducted a three-phased formative study. Our results show that the most important factors were who was requesting, why the requester wanted the participant's location, and what level of detail would be most useful to the requester. After determining these, participants were typically willing to disclose either the most useful detail or nothing about their location. From our findings, we reflect on the decision process for location disclosure. With these results, we hope to influence the design of future locationenhanced applications and services.

Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to conventional displays and focused activi... more Traditionally, computer interfaces have been confined to conventional displays and focused activities. However, as displays become embedded throughout our environment and daily lives, increasing numbers of them must operate on the periphery of our attention. Peripheral displays can allow a person to be aware of information while she is attending to some other primary task or activity. We present the Peripheral Displays Toolkit (PTK), a toolkit that provides structured support for managing user attention in the development of peripheral displays. Our goal is to enable designers to explore different approaches to managing user attention. The PTK supports three issues specific to conveying information on the periphery of human attention. These issues are abstraction of raw input, rules for assigning notification levels to input, and transitions for updating a display when input arrives. Our contribution is the investigation of issues specific to attention in peripheral display design and a toolkit that encapsulates support for these issues. We describe our toolkit architecture and present five sample peripheral displays demonstrating our toolkit's capabilities.

One of the opportunities of ubiquitous computing is to provide information in new ways in our eve... more One of the opportunities of ubiquitous computing is to provide information in new ways in our everyday environments. In this paper we explore novel display opportunities in everyday situations with the design and study of the Hanger Display -a system for ambiently conveying information embedded in a wardrobe. We have built a working prototype of this display and explored it with users in a formative study. The results of the study show that this display is useful and appealing to people. Our experience creating and evaluating the Hanger Display also provided interesting insights for future work in embedding technology in everyday objects. In particular, we saw that such technology is beneficial because it provides information in places where it is useful, taking advantage of the established meaning of artifacts and places, and seamlessly supporting activities that occur in these places. In addition, we learned that such embodied interfaces could lead to new interaction possibilities, doing more than simply displaying peripheral information.

Tangible interfaces have the potential to support learning for non-expert users, ease 3D navigati... more Tangible interfaces have the potential to support learning for non-expert users, ease 3D navigation, and foster collaboration. We developed two physical devices aimed at school children for navigating a 3D virtual model of the human body. Results from a 40 subject user study suggest that these devices can encourage collaboration and improve the learnability of a navigational interface.

Given the difficult design challenge posed by mobile devices, the WebQuilt and Mobile Devices pro... more Given the difficult design challenge posed by mobile devices, the WebQuilt and Mobile Devices project involved extending WebQuilt [8], a Web site testing and analysis tool, to work with PDAs (Personal Digital Assistants) and Internet phones. This included background research regarding the principles of Human Computer Interaction and usability testing, understanding WebQuilt, and researching mobile technologies, mobile Web site design, and how to best serve mobile designers with WebQuilt. The necessary changes were implemented to allow for PDA proxying and visualization and similar changes were started for Internet phones. The project involved designing and building the framework for deploying the tests to mobile users, and running usability tests to gauge the effectiveness of WebQuilt for mobile devices. The tests showed that WebQuilt has potential for helping mobile Web site designers find usability problems.

In this paper we discuss a pilot usability study using wireless Internet-enabled personal digital... more In this paper we discuss a pilot usability study using wireless Internet-enabled personal digital assistants (PDAs). We compared usability data gathered in traditional lab studies with a proxy-based clickstream logging and analysis tool. We found that this remote testing technique can more easily gather many of the contentrelated usability issues, but device-related issues are more difficult to capture.

This paper describes the visual analysis tool WebQuilt, a web usability logging and visualization... more This paper describes the visual analysis tool WebQuilt, a web usability logging and visualization system that helps web design teams record and analyze usability tests. The logging portion of WebQuilt unobtrusively gathers clickstream data as users complete specified tasks. This data is then aggregated and presented as an interactive graph, where nodes of the graph are images of the web pages visited, and arrows are the transitions between pages. To aid analysis of the gathered usability test data, the WebQuilt visualization provides filtering capabilities and semantic zooming, allowing the designer to understand the test results at the gestalt view of the entire graph, and then drill down to sub-paths and single pages. The visualization highlights important usability issues, such as pages where users spent a lot of time, pages where users get off track during the task, navigation patterns, and exit pages, all within the context of a specific task. WebQuilt is designed to conduct remote usability testing on a variety of Internet-enabled devices and provide a way to identify potential usability problems when the tester cannot be present to observe and record user actions.

Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to multitask.... more Peripheral displays are an important class of applications that improve our ability to multitask. Increased knowledge on how to design and evaluate glanceable peripheral displays can lead to better support for multitasking. We will contribute a set of guidelines for designing glanceable peripheral displays, using the wealth of abstraction techniques (e.g., change detection, feature extraction), design variables (e.g., color, shape), and design characteristics (e.g., dimensionality, symbolism) available. We will contribute an evaluation framework that clearly defines peripheral displays, metrics for evaluating their success, and guidelines for selecting evaluation methods. These contributions will improve peripheral displays that enable users to manage multiple tasks through low-effort monitoring.

Peripheral displays are an important application for enabling people to be constantly aware of in... more Peripheral displays are an important application for enabling people to be constantly aware of information while doing other activities. How does one evaluate a peripheral awareness display to determine if it provides awareness without distracting the user inappropriately from other tasks? We explore evaluation metrics for peripheral displays and describe proposed support to be added to an existing toolkit for creating peripheral display prototypes.

Prototype: mobile tool provides text transcriptions of the last 30 seconds of audio, upon user re... more Prototype: mobile tool provides text transcriptions of the last 30 seconds of audio, upon user request The purpose of this project was to create a tool for people… [read] mobile remote: relay services (phone, video, IP) in-person: recognition (speech [IBM ViaVoice], sign language [Edwards '97]) nonmobile sound awareness communication A great deal of assistive technology has been created for the deaf, including support for •non-mobile communication: