All in a Day’s Work: User Interface Design for Multitasking, Resource Organization, and Collaboration in Knowledge Work

Knowledge workers manage multiple tasks, collaborate effectively, and leverage the spatial organization of their work area; all of these practices have a relationship to the construct of activity. In this research, I have synthesized data about knowledge workers’ practices, findings from the development and evaluation of early activity-based systems, and theoretical understandings of cognition and activity into a set of challenges for the research and development of activity-based systems. I am addressing these challenges and incorporating lessons learned from previous technological explorations in a research prototype, the Giornata system, a demonstration of how the traditional desktop metaphor can be re-envisioned to better match knowledge workers’ practices by emphasizing activity as a primary organizing principle in GUI-based interaction. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and presentation]: User Interfaces—Graphical user interfaces. General terms: Design, Human Factors