Nov 2, 1997 - MAS 963: Intelligence Augmentation. Project Report for Pattie ... communicate via services such as email, fax, and telephony. A recent study of.
Message Swatch Temporal Representation for Information Augmentation Nitin Sawhney MAS 963: Intelligence Augmentation Project Report for Pattie Maes November, 1997
Introduction A watch is an everyday wearable artifact used by most people to manage their daily lives. It also serves as jewelry and has an aesthetic function in that regard. As our lives become more dependent on electronic information and communication such as email, voicemail, electronic calendars etc., we start utilizing much more complicated and bulky devices to manage the information. A watch offers a possible platform to provide personal augmentation via a concise display of timely electronic information. The challenge is in designing an effective interface that takes advantage of the inherent properties of a watch dial, without overloading the representation with undue complexity. The overall design should be both informative at a glance and aesthetically pleasing, since the watch is such a personal artifact.
Problem: Information Overload In an information rich environment, people access a multitude of content such as news, weather, stock reports, and data from a variety of information sources. People increasingly communicate via services such as email, fax, and telephony. A recent study of communications in the workplace (Pitney Bowes Study, April 8, 19971), indicates that such a growth in information and communication options is fundamentally changing the workplace and “beginning to have a seismic effect on people’s professional and personal lives”. The very presence of leading edge communications tools like cellular phones, pagers, e-mail, laptops, fax machines and voice mail is undermining individual productivity and lowering morale. It showed that overwhelming demands of communication and messaging have left a significant number of workers in these companies (71%) feeling overwhelmed. The study found that the average worker sends and receives an astonishing 178 messages per day. As workers struggle to keep up with the incredible volume of messaging going back and forth through a variety of communication methods, they often find that the "real work" has to wait until after hours or even weekends. A partial solution to information overload is to give people timely and filtered information, most relevant to the them at their present time [Maes94]. Such information should be represented in a concise and consistent manner such that it does not require much cognitive load. Current applications such as email readers present all messages sequentially and do not provide an easy way of glancing the information space or filtering important messages. Voice mail systems don’t provide any visual representation to glance messages easily. And finally calendar systems are complicated and not always accessible for timely reminders. Hence, a unified messaging and scheduling system that provides relevant and 1
http://www.pitneybowes.com/pbi/whatsnew/releases/workers_overwhelmed.htm
timely information at a glance is desirable. Such a system delivered on a wearable device, such as a watch would provide immediate access to timely information.
Attributes of Personal Messages & Daily Events Most frequent forms of personal communication include voice mail (accounts for 73% external communication), email (accounts for 66% internal communication). Calendar events can provide reminders throughout the day. Hence messages can be grouped into these three types. A unique parameter of each message is its time of arrival. Each message typically has a duration (voice mail or calendar events) or length (email). For email messages the sender and subject are known, whereas voice messages may provide the number of the caller if the person has Caller-ID features. The system can also detect if messages are already read or replied to. One can determine the urgency level of a message based on characteristics such as importance of the sender, weather its a personal or group message and also based on related entries in the user’s calendar, rolodex or recent messages sent to others. CLUES is a filtering and prioritization system developed by Matt Marx at the Media Lab [Marx96]. It detects the timely nature of email messages by finding correlation between a user’s calendar, rolodex, to-do list, as well as a record of outgoing messages and phone calls. Content-based email filtering using CLUES has been integrated in Message Swatch to determine the priority level of email or voice messages astimely, personal or very important.
Message Swatch: Design and Implementation The affordances of the watch can be used to create an interface to represent dynamic personal information. The Message Swatch has a simple visual display that allows one to easily glance to understand its chronological representation. The spatial display of the watch dial has additive affordances [Norman94]that allows representation of different message attributes using geometric and color attributes of the display. Email and voice messages are shown on the dial of the watch, according to their time of arrival, importance and duration by overlaying as lines on the dial with varying attributes such as line thickness and brightness. Voice messages are shown in the inner ring as smaller lines whereas email messages are shown as longer lines. This technique is used since there are usually more email messages and that requires larger space for display in a radial form. The current message is highlighted as red and the line representing it moves back-andforth when the message is played. Scheduled events are shown as shaded areas of the dial, dynamically changing (in brightness) as the event gets closer in time. A message on the watch can be selected by moving a ring and positioning it on the message and the content of the message will be played as audio to the user. The current implementation of Message Swatch is based on a Java-based applet that simulates a real-time watch display. It communicates via Sockets protocol with several information servers running remotely that notify theSwatch when new email, voice messages arrive and if calendar entries are updated. The arrival time of email and voice messages is used to compute their angular position on the clock display. Calendar entries are read from the calendar file and parsed to display the events as shaded regions placed around the clock (see Figures 1-4 shown below).
Figure 1-4: Display of information in Message Swatch using a 12 and 24-hour format. Voice messages are shown in the inner ring and email messages as longer lines. The shaded areas represent calendar events, with the current one highlighted.
Design Issues and Conclusions The scalability of the display is an issue as the number of messages increase. The user can filter the messages shown on the display by selectively requesting only unread messages or messages for the current day. This helps reduce the number of messages shown concurrently and makes the information space more manageable to get an overview of relevant messages. Currently the size of message lines reflects their duration or length, yet this is problematic when messages containing 2 lines to 5000 lines must be shown. This issue can be resolved if logarithmic scaling is used to display the duration in manageable form. The line size of the messages can be used to indicate most recent messages, with new messages shown as longer lines and older ones diminishing in size. Such filtering would update the display every hour to continuously indicate the timely messages, based on the present time. Finally a continuously varying form of concentric lines provides implicit aesthetic display for a personal and fashionable artifact such as a watch.
References [Maes94] Maes, Pattie. “Agents that Reduce Work and Information Overload” Communications of the ACM, July 1994/Vol.34, No.7, pp. 31-41. [Marx96] Marx, Matthew and Chris Schmandt. “CLUES: Dynamic Personalized Message Filtering”. Proceedings of CSCW ‘96, pp. 113-121, November 1996. [Norman94] Norman, Donald A. “The Power of Representation” in Things That Make Us Smart : Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine. AddisonWesley Pub Co. May 1994. [Sawhney97] Nitin Sawhney and ChrisSchmandt. "Design of Spatialized Audio in Nomadic Environments." Proceedings of the International Conference on Auditory Display, November 2-5, 1997, Palo Alto, CA.
