Abstract:
Computers are used for various purposes and frequent context switch is inevitable. In this setting, retrieving the documents, files, and web pages that have been used for a task can be a challenge. While modern applications provide a history of recent documents for users to resume work, this is not sufficient to retrieve all the digital resources relevant to a given primary document. The histories currently available - file names, web page titles, or URLs - does not take into account the complex dependencies that exist among resources across applications. To address this problem, we tested the idea of using a visual history of a computer screen to retrieve digital resources within a few days through the development of ScreenTrack. ScreenTrack is software that captures screenshots of a computer at regular intervals. It then generates a time-lapse video from the captured screenshots and lets users retrieve a recently opened document or web page from a screenshot that they recognize from its visuals. Through a controlled user study, it was found that participants were able to retrieve requested information more quickly with ScreenTrack than under the control condition. A follow-up study showed that the participants used ScreenTrack to retrieve previously used resources, in order to resume interrupted tasks.
