TimeSpace: activity-based temporal visualisation of personal information spaces

• Authors: Aparna Krishnan;Steve Jones
• Venue: Personal and Ubiquitous Computing
• Year: 2005

Users’ personal information spaces are characterized by their content, organisation, and ongoing user interaction with them. They are fluid entities, evolving over time, and supporting multiple user activities that may require different perspectives of the same underlying information structure. Increasing storage capacity of computing devices and ready access to networked resources puts users at risk of information overload, and presents increasing challenges in organising and accessing their information. The hierarchical model of information organisation currently dominates personal computing, and is realised for the user in interfaces that help to manage and access filestore hierarchies. Such a model provides limited inherent support for what users do—carry out a range of interleaved activities over time. In this paper, we describe the TimeSpace system, which provides perspectives on a user’s information resources based on activities and temporal attributes of the information. TimeSpace can be used alongside, or in place of, existing systems and models (such as the Microsoft Windows hierarchical file model). User interaction with an information space is non-intrusively observed and then represented automatically in TimeSpace. Visualisations provide overviews of user activity on multiple projects and detailed views of activity within particular projects, allowing navigation forward and backward in time. An observational study of use of the system revealed positive user views of the utility of temporal, activity-oriented workspaces in real world contexts alongside existing tools. Participants appreciated being offered a different perspective on their electronic information collection, one that visually shows the composition and development of their information space. They were interested in using the system for current and long-term work as well as for archiving information, as the visualisations provide a context for their work and give an overview of all their work in progress. The ideas embodied by the system and its visualisations show promise and raise a number of issues for further exploration. In future work, these ideas will be adapted and extended to support users in managing their information spaces across multiple personal devices, locations and time.