WearWrite: Orchestrating the Crowd to Complete Complex Tasks from Wearables (We Wrote This Paper on a Watch)

In this paper we introduce a paradigm for completing complex tasks from wearable devices by leveraging crowdsourcing, and demonstrate its validity for academic writing. We explore this paradigm using a collaborative authoring system, called WearWrite, which is designed to enable authors and crowd workers to work together using an Android smartwatch and Google Docs to produce academic papers, including this one. WearWrite allows expert authors who do not have access to large devices to contribute bits of expertise and big picture direction from their watch, while freeing them of the obligation of integrating their contributions into the overall document. Crowd workers on desktop computers actually write the document. We used this approach to write several simple papers, and found it was effective at producing reasonable drafts. However, the workers often needed more structure and the authors more context. WearWrite addresses these issues by focusing workers on specific tasks and providing select context to authors on the watch. We demonstrate the system’s feasibility by writing this paper using it. INTRODUCTION Smartwatches like the Android Smartwatch, Apple Watch, and Samsung Gear Live make it possible for people to remain connected wherever they are from easyto-access devices on their wrists. Wearable devices are quickly advancing from being merely entertaining to being capable of performing a wide range of important tasks. However, performing complex tasks is difficult on a wearable device because the interfaces provided by wearable technology are limited. Text input is hard from a watch, and very little content can be displayed at any one time. Smartwatches are often designed to be used when the user’s attention is fragmented, with the user being able to pay attention to the wearable device only in micro moments lasting a few seconds at most. These constraints make it challenging to create user experiences that retain the full range of functionality available with large screens and keyboards. We believe it is possible to support complex watch-based tasks despite these limitations. Complex computing tasks may be difficult to perform wholly using wearable devices due to their constrained interaction capabilities, but they can be successfully completed from wearable devices by directing the crowd in how to do them on one’s behalf. A domain expert using only a wearable device is able to 1) contribute bits of necessary expertise and 2) manage the contributions of crowd workers, so that the task is performed similarly to what the expert could achieve on a desktop computer. Tasks that cannot currently be performed using wearable technology alone can be completed in this hybrid manner. The specific task we explore is academic writing. This is a challenging domain to crowdsource because the technical content of an academic paper requires expertise to explain, and writing a good paper requires maintain global context. We present WearWrite, a system that allows authors who do not have access to large devices to contribute unique insight related to their domain of expertise and big picture direction from their watch, while using crowd workers who have access to additional context to implement the changes suggested by the author from their desktop computers and work ensure consistency. Enabling academic authors to contribute their unique expertise to a project through wearable technology allows them to take advantage of free micromoments. Additionally, by employing crowd workers to create content and only requiring the author to respond to it, WearWrite takes advantage of the fact that