John Tang, James Lin, Jeff Pierce, Clemens Drews
Recent Shortcuts is a research prototype that illustrates how to support quick access to recently used computer objects, as identified in our empirical studies. The overall goal of Recent Shortcuts is to help support users’ current activity based on their recent computer interactions without requiring any additional user effort.
Recent Shortcuts supports a user’s coordination with others on shared activities by:
- providing a list of files, people, and attachments that have been recently interacted with through the computer desktop
- automatically filtering and sorting that list of objects based on the user’s current context to anticipate what objects the user might currently need
- offering drag and drop copying so the user can include these objects into the current context
In this way, Recent Shortcuts goes beyond current OS capabilities, like My Recent Documents in Windows, that only tracks files and applications and doesn’t support drag and drop.
The current Recent Shortcuts prototype captures three kinds of objects:
- Recently used files (from My Recent Documents in Windows) and file folders
- People from recent email correspondence (from Lotus Notes and Thunderbird email clients) and instant messages (from Lotus Sametime)
- Email attachments from recently viewed email messages (from Lotus Notes and Thunderbird email clients)
The following figure shows the Recent Shortcuts prototype with one entry for a person, Tessa Lau, expanded to show what what collections of people Tessa has been included in from recent email correspondence. Our empirical studies found that beyond needing quick access to email addresses of individuals, users often wanted quick access to an ad hoc group of people from recent email correspondence. Recent Shortcuts makes these collections available as a sub-menu from any member of the group. Double clicking on a group entry will open an email compose window addressed to that collection of people.
The next figure shows an email compose window brought up by Recent Shortcuts to a group of people. From here, the user can also use Recent Shortcuts to drag and drop a recently saved file to include as an email attachment.
In future work, Recent Shortcuts will explore tracking other types of recently used computer objects, such as web page URLs, email messages (body), and online calendar events. We will also explore ways of dynamically sort and filtering them to present the most useful organization of objects from recent interactions according to the user’s current context. For example, if the user is currently in the addressing field of an email message, the user would most likely need access to recently encountered email addresses, so Recent Shortcuts could collapse the other object types and show more of the email addresses that Recent Shortcuts tracks.
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