Improving User-Awareness by Factoring it Out of Applications

Computers support more and more daily activities for common users. However, user attention is taking a heavy toll when scaling the use of computers for tasks that span many locations, large periods of time, and that are constantly interrupted and resumed. To reduce such toll, computer systems must improve their awareness of user tasks, across multiple devices, and over time spans of weeks or even years. In this paper, we discuss the limitations of building such awareness into applications, and propose to factor the awareness of user tasks into a common infrastructure. We summarize the main features of such infrastructure and distill some of the lessons learned.