article review - 'Understanding Memory Triggers for Task Tracking'

Article
06/26/2007

Article title: Understanding Memory Triggers for Task Tracking'

Authors: AJ Bernheim Brush, Brian R. Meyers, Desney S. Tan, Mary Czerwinski

Publication: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Computer-Human Interaction

Year of publication: 2007

In this CHI '07 short paper, the authors discuss a field study aimed at understanding how participants use memory triggers to write their status reports. The authors originally developed and deployed software to monitor the users' computer activities and thus assist in the status report activity, but found that it was not as widely used as they had hoped. Thus, they conducted a field study with eight participants (four at two companies, one of which is our esteemed employer) to better understand the underlying activity that they want to support.

The field study had four research questions:

what processes and tools do people use to track their work?
how much information do they provide about the duration of their individual tasks?
how do they decide what information to include in the status report?
how long do people spend on tracking their work and writing their status report?

In the course of the field study, the authors discovered that the participants fell across a continuum for their processes. Some participants kept a running tally of their tasks, while others relied on triggers (such as email, calendar events, tasks, and notes). Many participants wanted high-level triggers instead of detailed information. Participants cared about tracking time only when they needed to do it for an external reason, such as time reporting for a client. The content of their reports was selected based on their perception of their audience and their level of interest in the information provided. Interestingly, participants tended to think that they spent less time on the task of writing their status reports than they actually did.

While the findings in this study aren't big or earth-shattering, this is useful when considering how to better enable users to write their status reports. I found it interesting that the functions typically associated with a PIM are the ones that are most useful when tracking time.

article review - 'Understanding Memory Triggers for Task Tracking'

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