THES: A Task History Explore System with Self-Extracting Cues Step by Step

Abstract

If a computer user could refer the situation of his/her own past task later, he/she would be able to recall procedures of that task. Based on these information, he/she can hit upon the useful idea for the on going task. In order to refer such situation, he/she can explore the situation in the log, sequence of situations, which consists of his/her activities on the computer. We call this log "task history". However, because he/she might not always recall the proper keywords about the target situation explicitly, he/she might waste huge effort to explore the task history. In this paper, we propose THES (Task History Explore System) for supporting to explore the task history. THES shows a user cues step by step to recall the detail about the target situation. THES shows two kinds of cues, "activity cues "that prompts to recall the memory about the activities performed in the target situation and "time cues" that prompts to recall the memory about the time of the target situation. As a result of a 5-week experiment, THES was effective for the task history exploration.