Working Set

Confidence level: ***

Status: proposed

Super-patterns

UsabilityProject/PatternLanguage/Tools for Humans

Problem statement

During day-to-day activities, people have medium- or long-term projects that carry a fair amount of "state". People create and receive information related to their projects, which they need to maintain current, archive, or discard. The computer should be aware of people's ongoing projects instead of being just a collection of disconnected tools.

Although computers do an acceptable job of archiving information, they help little in keeping together all the little bits of data that make up a project. Computers don't usually present a a "big picture" overview of everything that is going on in one's work.

It should be easy for a computer to answer these questions:

• What have I been working on?
• What things are pending in my work?
• With whom have I communicated recently? What have they sent to me?

Therefore:

Maintain a working set of things that people access frequently within a window of time. Present that working set to people in a conspicuous way, close to the "center of action" in the desktop, so that they can go back to a useful place at all times while they work.

Sub-patterns

UsabilityProject/PatternLanguage/Personal Body of Knowledge UsabilityProject/PatternLanguage/Clear Focus UsabilityProject/PatternLanguage/Context Awareness

References

http://homepages.cwi.nl/~steven/sigchi/bulletin/1995.3/barreau.html - Barreau and Nardi, Finding and Reminding: File Organization from the Desktop

Barreau, D.K. (1995). Context as a factor in personal information management systems. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 46, 5 (June) pp 327-339.

Lansdale, M. (1983). The psychology of personal information management. Applied Ergonomics 19, 55-66.

Nardi, B., Anderson, K. and Erickson, T. (1994). Filing and finding computer files. Technical Report # 118. Cupertino: Apple Computer, Inc.