The demands of daily work offer few opportunities for workers to take stock of their own progress, big or small, which can lead to lower motivation, engagement, and higher risk of burnout. We present Highlight Matome, a personal online tool that encourages workers to quickly record and rank a single work highlight each day, helping them gain awareness of their own successes. We describe results from a field experiment investigating our tool's effectiveness for improving workers' engagement, perceptions, and affect. Thirty-three knowledge workers in Japan and the U.S. used Highlight Matome for six weeks. Our results show that using our tool for less than one minute each day significantly increased measures of work engagement, dedication, and positivity. A qualitative analysis of the highlights offers a window into participants' emotions and perceptions. We discuss implications for theories of inner work life and worker well-being.

Livestreaming and video calls have grown in popularity due to the increased connectivity and advancements in mobile devices. Our interactions with these cameras are limited as the cameras are either fixed or manually remote controlled. Here we present a Wizard-of-Oz elicitation study to inform the design of interactions with smart 360\textdegree\ cameras or robotic mobile desk cameras for use in video-conferences and live-streaming situations. There was an overall preference for devices that can minimize distraction as well as preferences for devices that can show they demonstrate an understanding of video-meeting context. We find participants dynamically grow with regards to the complexity of interactions which illustrate the need for deeper event semantics within the Camera AI. Finally, we detail interaction techniques and design insights to inform the next generation of personal video cameras for streaming and collaboration.

Searching collaboratively for places of interest is a common activity that frequently occurs on individual mobile phones, or on large tourist-information displays in public places such as visitor centers or train stations. We created a public display system for collaborative travel planning, as well as a mobile app that can augment the display. We tested them against third-party mobile apps in a simulated travel-search task to understand how the unique features of mobile phones and large displays might be leveraged together to improve collaborative travel planning experience.

Historically, people have interacted with companies and institutions through telephone-based dialogue systems and paper-based forms. Now, these interactions are rapidly moving to web- and phone-based chat systems. While converting traditional telephone dialogues to chat is relatively straightforward, converting forms to conversational interfaces can be challenging. In this work, we introduce methods and interfaces to enable the conversion of PDF and web-based documents that solicit user input into chat-based dialogues. Document data is first extracted to associate fields and their textual descriptions using meta-data and lightweight visual analysis. The field labels, their spatial layout, and associated text are further analyzed to group related fields into natural conversational units. These correspond to questions presented to users in chat interfaces to solicit information needed to complete the original documents and downstream processes they support. This user supplied data can be inserted into the source documents and/or in downstream databases. User studies of our tool show that it streamlines form-to-chat conversion and produces conversational dialogues of at least the same quality as a purely manual approach.

Conversational agents stand to play an important role in supporting behavior change and well-being in many domains. With users able to interact with conversational agents through both text and voice, understanding how designing for these channels supports behavior change is important. To begin answering this question, we designed a conversational agent for the workplace that supports workers’ activity journaling and self-learning through reflection. Our agent, named Robota, combines chat-based communication as a Slack Bot and voice interaction through a personal device using a custom Amazon Alexa Skill. Through a 3-week controlled deployment, we examine how voice-based and chat-based interaction affect workers’ reflection and support self-learning. We demonstrate that, while many current technical limitations exist, adding dedicated mobile voice interaction separate from the already busy chat modality may further enable users to step back and reflect on their work. We conclude with discussion of the implications of our findings to design of workplace self-tracking systems specifically and to behavior-change systems in general.

Understanding team communication and collaboration patterns is critical for improving work efficiency in organizations. This paper presents an interactive visualization system, T-Cal, that supports the analysis of conversation data from modern team messaging platforms (e.g., Slack). T-Cal employs a user-familiar visual interface, a calendar, to enable seamless multi-scale browsing of data from different perspectives. T-Cal also incorporates a number of analytical techniques for disentangling interleaving conversations, extracting keywords, and estimating sentiment. The design of T-Cal is based on an iterative user-centered design process including field studies, requirements gathering, initial prototypes demonstration, and evaluation with domain users. The resulting two case studies indicate the effectiveness and usefulness of T-Cal in real-world applications, including student group chats during a MOOC and daily conversations within an industry research lab.

Effective communication of activities and progress in the workplace is crucial for the success of many modern organizations. In this paper, we extend current research on workplace communication and uncover opportunities for technology to support effective work activity reporting. We report on three studies: With a survey of 68 knowledge workers followed by 14 in-depth interviews, we investigated the perceived benefits of different types of progress reports and an array of challenges at three stages: Collection, Composition, and Delivery. We show an important interplay between written and face-to-face reporting, and highlight the importance of tailoring a report to its audience. We then present results from an analysis of 722 reports composed by 361 U.S.-based knowledge workers, looking at the influence of the audience on a report’s language. We conclude by discussing opportunities for future technologies to assist both employees and managers in collecting, interpreting, and reporting progress in the workplace.

モバイル技術の発展と日常生活における継続的なつながりは、仕事の進め方に大きく影響を与えている。センシング技術の活用は個人による使用事例が多くを占めているが、ワークプレイスはセンシング技術を活用するのに重要かつ適切な環境である。つまり、従業員が自分の追跡可能な端末を使ってセンシング技術を連携させることが可能である。本稿では、ワークプレイスにおける身体的、精神的、および社会的に良好な状態と生産性を向上させる技術について、2つの最新の調査結果と、行動を変える姿勢を維持 るための仕組みを報告する。次に、新しい作業の領域について簡単に議論する。

For tourists, interactions with digital public displays often depend on specific technologies that users may not be familiar with (QR codes, NFC, Bluetooth); may not have access to because of networking issues (SMS), may lack a required app (QR codes), or device technology (NFC); may not want to use because of time constraints (WiFi, Bluetooth); or may not want to use because they are worried about sharing their data with a third-party service (text, WiFi). In this demonstration, we introduce ItineraryScanner, a system that allows users to seamlessly share content with a public travel kiosk system.

In this paper, we describe DocHandles, a novel system that allows users to link to specific document parts in their chat applications. As users type a message, they can invoke the tool by referring to a specific part of a document, e.g., “@fig1 needs revision”. By combining text parsing and document layout analysis, DocHandles can find and present all the figures “1” inside previously shared documents, allowing users to explicitly link to the relevant “document handle”. Documents become first-class citizens inside the conversation stream where users can seamlessly integrate documents in their text-centric messaging application.

It is increasingly possible to use cameras and sensors to detect and analyze human appearance for the purposes of personalizing user experiences. Such systems are already deployed in some public places to personalize advertisements and recommend items. However, since these technologies are not yet widespread, we do not have a good sense of the perceived benefits and drawbacks of public display systems that use face detection as an input for personalized recommendations. We conducted a user study with a system that inferred a user’s gender and age from a facial detection and analysis algorithm and used this to present recommendations in two scenarios (finding stores to visit in a mall and finding a pair of sunglasses to buy).  This work provides an initial step towards understanding user reactions to a new and emerging form of implicit recommendation based on physical appearance.

Video conferencing is widely used to help deliver educational presentations, such as lectures or informational webinars, to a distributed audience. While individuals in a dyadic conversation may be able to use webcam streams to assess the engagement level of their interlocutor with some ease, as the size of the audience in a video conference setting increases, it becomes increasingly difficult to interpret how engaged the overall group may be. In this work, we use a mixed-methods approach to understand how presenters and attendees of online presentations use available cues to perceive and interpret audience behavior (such as how engaged the group is). Our results suggest that while webcams are seen as useful by presenters to increase audience visibility and encourage attention, audience members do not uniformly benefit from seeing others’ webcams; other interface cues such as chat may be more useful and informative engagement indicators for both parties. We conclude with design recommendations for future systems to improve what is sensed and presented.

Most teleconferencing tools treat users in distributed meetings monolithically: all participants are meant to be connected to one another in the more-or-less the same manner. In reality, though, people connect to meetings in all manner of different contexts, sometimes sitting in front of a laptop or tablet giving their full attention, but at other times mobile and involved in other tasks or as a liminal participant in a larger group meeting. In this paper we present the design and evaluation of two applications, Penny and MeetingMate, designed to help users in non-standard contexts participate in meetings.

We previously created the HyperMeeting system to support a chain of geographically and temporally distributed meetings in the form of a hypervideo. This paper focuses on playback plans that guide users through the recorded meeting content by automatically following available hyperlinks. Our system generates playback plans based on users' interests or prior meeting attendance and presents a dialog that lets users select the most appropriate plan. Prior experience with playback plans revealed users' confusion with automatic link following within a sequence of meetings. To address this issue, we designed three timeline visualizations of playback plans. A user study comparing the timeline designs indicated that different visualizations are preferred for different tasks, making switching among them important. The study also provided insights that will guide research of personalized hypervideo, both inside and outside a meeting context.

The confluence of technologies such as telepresence, immersive imaging, model based virtual mirror worlds, mobile live streaming, etc. give rise to a capability for people anywhere to view and connect with present or past events nearly anywhere on earth. This capability properly belongs to a public commons, available as a birthright of all humans, and can been seen as part of an evolutionary transition supporting a global collective mind. We describe examples and elements of this capability, and suggest how they can be better integrated through a tool we call TeleViewer and a framework called WorldViews, which supports easy sharing of views as well as connecting of providers and consumers of views all around the world.

As workstyles change to include more dynamic contexts and denser spaces, connected objects and spaces in the workplace can play a bigger role in helping people get their work done, while also helping them navigate the continually blending boundaries between work- and home lives. In this talk, we argue that the workplace is particularly well-suited for realizing the "connected life" by including both company-initiated sensing in the workplace and personal tracking devices introduced by individual workers. We describe some examples of ubiquitous sensing in the workplace, and future opportunities as well as open technical and ethical issues for designing for the connected [work]life.

The negative effect of lapses during a behavior-change program has been shown to increase the risk of repeated lapses and, ultimately, program abandonment. In this paper, we examine the potential of system-driven lapse management -- supporting users through lapses as part of a behavior-change tool. We first review lessons from domains such as dieting and addiction research and discuss the design space of lapse management. We then explore the value of one approach to lapse management -- the use of "cheat points" as a way to encourage sustained participation. In an online study, we first examine interpretations of progress that was reached through using cheat points. We then present findings from a deployment of lapse management in a two-week field study with 30 participants. Our results demonstrate the potential of this approach to motivate and change users' behavior. We discuss important open questions for the design of future technology-mediated behavior change programs.

The use of videoconferencing in the workplace has been steadily growing. While multitasking during video conferencing is often necessary, it is also viewed as impolite and sometimes unacceptable. One potential contributor to negative attitudes towards such multitasking is the disrupted sense of eye contact that occurs when an individual shifts their gaze away to another screen, for example, in a dual-monitor setup, common in office settings. We present a system to improve a sense of eye contact over videoconferencing in dual-monitor setups. Our system uses computer vision and desktop activity detection to dynamically choose the camera with the best view of a user's face. We describe two alternative implementations of our system (RGB-only, and a combination of RGB and RGB-D cameras). We then describe results from an online experiment that shows the potential of our approach to significantly improve perceptions of a person's politeness and engagement in the meeting.

This paper presents a detailed examination of factors that affect perceptions of, and attitudes towards multitasking in dyadic video conferencing. We first report findings from interviews with 15 professional users of videoconferencing. We then report results from a controlled online experiment with 397 participants based in the United States. Our results show that the technology used for multitasking has a significant effect on others' assumptions of what secondary activity the multitasker is likely engaged in, and that this assumed activity in turn affects evaluations of politeness and appropriateness. We also describe how different layouts of the video conferencing UI may lead to better or worse ratings of engagement and in turn ratings of polite or impolite behavior. We then propose a model that captures our results and use the model to discuss implications for behavior and for the design of video communication tools.

We present MixMeetWear, a smartwatch application that allows users to maintain awareness of the audio and visual content of a meeting while completing other tasks. Users of the system can listen to the audio of a meeting and also view, zoom, and pan webcam and shared content keyframes of other meeting participants' live streams in real time. Users can also provide input to the meeting via speech-to-text or predefined responses. A study showed that the system is useful for peripheral awareness of some meetings.

Remote meetings are messy. There are an ever-increasing number of support tools available, and, as past work has shown, people will tend to select a subset of those tools to satisfy their own institutional, social, and personal needs. While video tools make it relatively easy to have conversations at a distance, they are less adapted to sharing and archiving multimedia content. In this paper we take a deeper look at how sharing multimedia content occurs before, during, and after distributed meetings. Our findings shed light on the decisions and rationales people use to select from the vast set of tools available to them to prepare for, conduct, and reconcile the results of a remote meeting.

While synchronous meetings are an important part of collaboration, it is not always possible for all stakeholders to meet at the same time. We created the concept of hypermeetings to support meetings with asynchronous attendance. Hypermeetings consist of a chain of video-recorded meetings with hyperlinks for navigating through the video content. HyperMeeting supports the synchronized viewing of prior meetings during a videoconference. Natural viewing behavior such as pausing generates hyperlinks between the previously recorded meetings and the current video recording. During playback, automatic link-following guided by playback plans present the relevant content to users. Playback plans take into account the user's meeting attendance and viewing history and match them with features such as speaker segmentation. A user study showed that participants found hyperlinks useful but did not always understand where they would take them. The study results provide a good basis for future system improvements.

As video-mediated communication reaches broad adoption, improving immersion and social interaction are important areas of focus in the design of tools for exploration and work-based communication. Here we present three threads of research focused on developing new ways of enabling exploration of a remote environment and interacting with the people and artifacts therein.

Websites can record individual users' activities and display them in a variety of ways. There is a tradeoff between detail and abstraction in visualization, especially when the amount of content increases and becomes more difficult to process. We conducted an experiment on Mechanical Turk varying the quality, detail, and visual presentation of information about an individual's past work to see how these design features affected perceptions of the worker. We found that providing detail in the display through text increased processing time and led to less positive evaluations. Visually abstract displays required less processing time but decreased confidence in evaluation. This suggests that different design parameters may engender differing psychological processes that influence reactions towards an unknown person.

In a variety of peer production settings, from Wikipedia to open source software development to crowdsourcing, individuals may encounter, edit, or review the work of unknown others. Typically this is done without much context to the person's past behavior or performance. To understand how exposure to an unknown individual's activity history influences attitudes and behaviors, we conducted an online experiment on Mechanical Turk varying the content, quality, and presentation of information about another Turker's work history. Surprisingly, negative work history did not lead to negative outcomes, but in contrast, a positive work history led to positive initial impressions that persisted in the face of contrary information. This work provides insight into the impact of activity history design factors on psychological and behavioral outcomes that can be of use in other related settings.