A framework for specifying and monitoring user tasks
Computers in Human Behaviour, (2006)Abstract
Interrupting users engaged in tasks typically has negative effects
on their task completion time, error rate, and affective state. Empirical
research has shown that these negative effects can be mitigated by
deferring interruptions until more opportune moments in a user�s
task sequence. However, existing systems that reason about when to
interrupt do not have access to models of user tasks that would allow
for such finer-grained temporal reasoning. To enable this reasoning,
we have developed an integrated framework for specifying and monitoring
user tasks. For task specification, our framework provides a language
that supports expressive specification of tasks using a concise notation.
For task monitoring, our framework provides an event database and
handler that manages events from any instrumented application and
a task monitor that observes a user�s progress through specified
tasks. We describe the design and implementation of our framework,
showing how it can be used to specify and monitor practical, representative
user tasks. We also report results from two user studies measuring
the effectiveness of our existing implementation. The use of our
framework will enable attention aware systems to consider a user�s
position in a task when reasoning about when to interrupt.
