Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory
Center for Automation Research
*also Department of Computer Science
University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742
Tel. (301) 405-2768 and 2680
plaisant@cs.umd.edu, ben@cs.umd.edu
Figure 1 The results of the search appear on the organizational
overview (the Bankscape) which
here has been zoomed to show only the institutional view of the Bank. Direct links give immediate
access to contact info, documents and tools. The bankscape can be zoomed out to show the personal
roles and the information is gathered in the appropriate role.
Note on QuickTime Videos
VIDEO 2:No caption supplied by authors
VIDEO 3:No caption supplied by authors
VIDEO 4:No caption supplied by authors
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.
FIGURE 2(also see end of VIDEO 4): The role fills the screen (see
insert) while the Bankscape
overview recedes in the corner. Each role has a vision statement, a schedule, and a hierarchy of tasks.
The Bankscape is still visible to allow rapid switching between roles.
NOTE
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:
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 (see VIDEO 2). 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 (see FIGURE 1 and VIDEO 3). 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 (see first part of VIDEO 4 )
(QuickTime Movie, about 1 mb)
(QuickTime Movie, about 1 mb)
(QuickTime Movie, about 1 mb)
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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
We greatly appreciate the support of the World Bank.
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
This "low fidelity" prototype was prepared with Macromedia Director and designed for a large 21"
1152x870 monitor. This made it difficult to videotape the screens and impossible to get useful
QuickTime movies with the low-end video digitizing board we had... The small videoclips provided here
are Director animations extracted from the prototype. Return to text
