OneTrace: Improving Event Recall and Coordination With Cross-Application Interaction Histories

Abstract

To coordinate and understand past actions in a collaborative activity, co-workers typically access shared artifacts and the interaction histories provided by their tools. We interviewed 12 knowledge workers who collaborate on shared text documents. We found that the scattering of historical data across collaborative and personal environments and the lack of compatibility between histories hinder coordination and event recall. To explore the design of cross-application history tools, we created OneTrace, a proof-of-concept system for sharing histories amongst applications and users based on a unified structure for representing interaction traces. We then introduce TracePicker, a tool that lets users cluster traces to contextualize past actions recorded by OneTrace. We evaluated TracePicker using a questionnaire- and scenario-based observation study. Results show that participants found the system helpful for communicating, understanding and contextualizing historical data. We conclude that designing cross-application histories such as OneTrace supports coordination and event recall.