KEYWORDS
Role manager, personal roles, desktop metaphor, coordination,
window management.
INTRODUCTION
We worked with the World Bank, a large international organization, to look at desktop environments of the near future. We chose to focus on a subset of problems that employees regularly have to struggle with:
- finding people who can help
- searching documents and resources
- juggling many roles (e.g. a person can be in charge of three
projects, member of two task forces, editor of the bank magazine,
and organizer of the holiday party.) A great deal of personal
organization is required to manage these roles whose goals, partners,
tools and documents are likely to be very different. The previous
research on role theory [1] or CSCW focuses mainly on the coordination
of individuals while our goal is to assist individuals manage
their multiple roles.
PERSONAL ROLE MANAGEMENT
We propose Personal Role Management as the guiding concept for
the next generation of graphic user interfaces [2]. The first
generation was the command line interfaces that required users
to know about computer concepts and syntax; These were replaced
by second generation graphical user interfaces with the desktop
metaphor, icons, and folders. Now, the third generation emphasizes
a docucentric approach, in which applications fade into the background
while multimedia documents become the center of attention. We
believe that the natural progression is toward a fourth generation
user-centered design emphasizing user's roles, colleagues, and
tasks rather than documents. Each separate role involves coordination
with differents groups of people and accomplishment of tasks within
a schedule.
ORGANIZATION OVERVIEWS
Our work on visual information seeking has highlighted the importance
of overviews to facilitate orientation, monitoring, and detection
of clusters, outliers, or trends. For the desktop we suggest the
use of a tailorable overview of the organization (here called
Bankscape). It is made of 4 parts: the personal and workgroups
views (both reflecting the personal roles of the user), plus the
business unit and institutional views reflecting the environment
in which the work is conducted. It reflects the organization of
the tools and information which can be explored. This overview,
coupled with display controls and query controls, provides a consistent
visual support to display the result of searches. The Bankscape
overview is also a part of the Personal Role Management. It provides
a visual representation of the relationships between a user's
many roles. This representation can be used to access the roles
themselves or to gather documents, people or resources for a role.
DYNAMIC QUERIES
Dynamic queries [3] are a novel approach to information seeking
that may enable users to cope with information overload. They
allow users to see an overview of the database, rapidly (100 msec
updates) explore and conveniently filter out unwanted information.
Our video illustrates a search across the directory and a report
database. The use of dynamic queries allows users to rapidly get
to a usable subset of names. Users can readjust the query while
watching on the Bankscape how the result is affected by each step
of the query.
The prototype illustrates how users can move smoothly between
searching for people, reading documents or information, and initiating
communication with colleagues. Names and numbers do not need to
be retyped or copied. Default "behavior" or settings
take in to account previous actions in other applications. The
prototype also gives examples of coordinated window management
when related windows are opened or closed together. Such techniques
will relieve the user from much of the tedious window house-keeping
that plagues current window applications.
REFERENCES
[1] Singh, B. & Rein, G. (1992) Role Interaction Nets (RINS): A Process Description Formalism, MCC, Austin, TX, USA, Technical Report CT-083-92
[2] Shneiderman, B., Plaisant, C.(1994), The Future of Graphic User Interfaces: Personal Role Managers , Keynote address, in People and Computers IX, British Computer Society HCI'94, Glasgow, Scotland (Aug. 1994) pp.3-8.
[3] Shneiderman, B. (1994) Dynamic Queries: a step beyond database
languages, IEEE Software 11 (6), pp.7-77
Note: This "low fidelity" prototype was prepared with Macromedia Director and designed for a large 21" monitor.
---We greatly appreciate the support of the World Bank---.
Abstract
In our exploration of future work environments for
the World Bank we propose two concepts. Organization overviews
provide a consistent support to present the results of a variety
of manual or semi-automated searches. This view can be adapted
or expanded for each class of users to finally map the multiple
personal roles an individual has in an organization. After command
line interfaces, graphical point and click interfaces, and the
current "docu-centric" designs, the natural direction
is towards a role-centered approach where we believe the emphasis
is on the management of those multiple roles. Each role involves
coordination with groups of people and accomplishment of tasks
within a schedule.