Recent shortcuts: Using recent interactions to support shared activities

Abstract

We present an empirical study of teams that revealed the amount of extraneous individual work needed to enable collaboration: finding references to other people, finding files to attach to email, managing incoming email attachments, managing the variety of files used in shared activities, and tracking what work is owed to others. Much of this work involves finding recently accessed objects that are needed again in the user's current task focus. These observations led to the design of Recent Shortcuts, a tool to help support coordination by making recently used objects easily accessible. Recent Shortcuts enables quick access to people (including groups of people), received attachments, files, and file folders that the user interacted with recently for re-use in the user's current context. Recent Shortcuts makes it easy to use these objects across applications with no additional user input and minimal changes to the user's applications or work practice. Early user experiences with a working prototype led to an extension that integrates recently accessed objects across multiple devices. Copyright 2007 ACM.