Reading #11: Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories

Comments

Shena Hoffman

Steven Hennessy

Reference

Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories

Tovi Grossman, Justin Matejka, George Fitzmaurice

UIST 2010 - New York

Summary:

Through logging of user events, Chronicle makes later examination of a user’s workflow in an image editing application possible. Though many have explored systems for tracking and presenting to users their past events, workflow histories have not been extensively explored up until this point. Chronicle is unique in that it provides the ability to investigate a document and determine how a particular effect or result was produced. Chronicle provides the user with a timeline, with tracks detailing important events over time. By scrolling through the timeline, users may see the settings which were changed or items created/destroyed in a particular time step. Additionally, Chronicle offers a hierarchical view of important change events to the right of the user interface. The investigation mechanism not only indicates the controls which were changed, but also provides a full video playback of the events which took place during the change. This creates the potential for documents to serve as their own tutorials. Additionally, Chronicle supports a wide array of probing and filtering mechanisms in order to find a specific change or effects usage. Chronicle was tested on eight users with at least three years of experience with image editing software. The results were qualitative, with users indicating a positive feeling about the software.

Discussion:

As someone who spends a lot of time watching tutorial videos for image and video editing products, I would greatly appreciate software like Chronicle. The authors have provided a more than thorough set of tools for creating chronicles of document events. Additionally, they have gone through the trouble to implement this on software which is in real world use as a product. I would really enjoy the opportunity to try out a piece of software like this. It would be great for collaboration and learning. I wish that their user study could have quantified results better, and more participants with a more well formed research question are always desirable. Additionally, I’d like to know the CPU and RAM usage while recording a chronicle document. I’d also like to see if the video capture sizes could be optimized. Finally, this concept needs to be generalized so that more applications can take advantage of it. Overall a great innovation and a tool which would be welcomed by the creative professional community.