The use of whiteboards is pervasive across a wide range of work domains. But some of the qualities that make them successful—an intuitive interface, physical working space, and easy erasure—inherently make them poor tools for archival and reuse. If whiteboard content could be made available in times and spaces beyond those supported by the whiteboard alone, how might it be appropriated? We explore this question via ReBoard, a system that automatically captures whiteboard images and makes them accessible through a novel set of user-centered access tools. Through the lens of a seven week workplace field study, we found that by enabling new workflows, ReBoard increased the value of whiteboard content for collaboration. AUTHOR KEYWORDS whiteboards, workflow, information reuse and sharing

Patients do considerable information work. Technologies that help patients manage health information so they can play active roles in their health-care, such as personal health records, provide patients with effective support for focused and sustained personal health tasks. Yet, little attention has been paid to patients ’ needs for information management support while on the go and away from their personal health information collections. Through a qualitative field study, we investigated the information work that breast cancer patients do in such ‘unanchored settings’. We report on the types of unanchored information work that patients do over the course of cancer treatment, reasons this work is challenging, and strategies used by patients to overcome those challenges. Our description of unanchored patient information work expands our understanding of patients’ information practices and points to valuable design directions for supporting critical but unmet needs. Author Keywords Personal health informatics, user study, mobile computing.

We present Inky, a command line for shortcut access to common web tasks. Inky aims to capture the efficiency benefits of typed commands while mitigating their usability problems. Inky commands have little or no new syntax to learn, and the system displays rich visual feedback while the user is typing, including missing parameters and contextual information automatically clipped from the target web site. Inky is an example of a new kind of hybrid between a command line and a GUI interface. We describe the design and implementation of two prototypes of this idea, and report the results of a field study. ACM Classification: H5.2 [Information interfaces and

The Jourknow project addresses the question of freeform notes known as information scraps. We are focused on unifying the user’s PIM tools, providing lightweight input and enabling support for uncommon types of personal information. In this position paper we describe our current directions and lessons learned from work on the Jourknow system. We have redesigned our lightweight input language for capture of arbitrary data types and developed a mobile phone client. We report on feedback from a weeklong user study, generating design recommendations for systems like Jourknow. Our study identified the importance of supporting common PIM data in addition to uncommon information types, of providing a mobile solution for capture and retrieval of notes, and of integrating with current user tools and practice. With respect to evaluation, we reflect on the large scale of personal information needed to evaluate our tools. Author Keywords Personal information management, lightweight input, information scraps

Mainstream PIM tools capture only a portion of the information that people need to manage. Many information scraps seem to exist that don’t make their way into these tools, instead being relegated to sticky notes, text files, and other makeshift storage, or simply being lost. In an effort to understand the role of these information scraps, the underlying needs they reflect, and the way PIM tools must be modified to support those needs, we created List-it, a micronote tool for quick and simple capture of information scraps. In this article, we analyze the notes and interaction logs of 420 volunteer users of List-it over a two-year period of study (August 2008-August 2010). We contextualize our analysis with results of two surveys and an e-mail interview we conducted in October 2009. We find that people are drawn to List-it by the ease and speed of note capture and by the ability to record scraps with arbitrary content that blends or completely escapes the types and roles imposed by our rigid PIM tools. Notes are taken to serve a variety of needs – reminding, reference, journaling/activity logging, brainstorming, and to indefinitely archive information of sentimental or personal value. Finally, while people differ considerably in the ways they keep information, our findings suggest such differences can be described as a combination of four distinct strategies, enriching the Filer/Piler distinction identified for classic document management. Author Keywords Personal information management, Note-taking

Abstract. Despite the potential benefits of digital note taking tools, research has found that people continue to use paper for creating micronotes, informal personal notes such as reminders and to-dos. Design recommendations from formative studies suggest that “natural ” input modalities such as voice and digital ink could help to overcome the drawbacks of text entry on phones and PDAs. We conducted an 18-person lab study to understand the perceived and actual trade-offs that these non-traditional input methods offer for micronote capture. We found that people preferred ink (8 participants) and voice (8 participants) input over keyboard (2 participants) input. Half our participants varied the input method they used in different environments, while the rest did not. However, paper remains popular and was preferred by 8 participants when given the option. The 9 participants whose ink and voice micronotes were transcribed with higher error rates had a noticeably different experience using voice including slower capture times, and higher mental and physical demand survey responses. The percentage of participants that preferred ink, voice, and keyboard was the same for both transcription quality groups.

The intertwining of everyday life and computation, along with a new generation of inexpensive digital recording devices and storage facilities, is revolutionizing our ability to collect and analyze human activity data. Such ubiquitous data collection has an exciting potential to augment human cognition and radically improve information-intensive work. In this paper we introduce a system to aid the process of data collection and analysis during observational research by providing non-intrusive automatic capture of paper-based annotations. The system exploits current note-taking practices and incorporates digital pen technology. We describe the development, deployment and use of the system for interactive visualization and annotation of multiple stream of video and other types of time-based data.