Lesson plan
Task-focused interface
The task-focused interface is a type of user interface which extends the desktop metaphor of the graphical user interface to make tasks, not files and folders, the primary unit of interaction. Instead of showing entire hierarchies of information, such as a tree of documents, a task-focused interface shows the subset of the tree that is relevant to the task-at-hand. This addresses the problem of information overload when dealing with large hierarchies, such as those in software systems or large sets of documents. The task-focused interface is composed of a mechanism which allows the user to specify the task being worked on and to switch between active tasks, a model of the task context such as a degree-of-interest (DOI) ranking, a focusing mechanism to filter or highlight the relevant documents. The task-focused interface has been validated with statistically significant increases to knowledge worker productivity. It has been broadly adopted by programmers and is a key part of the Eclipse integrated development environment. The technology is also referred to as the "task context" model and the "task-focused programming" paradigm.
Article summary
The task-focused interface is a type of user interface which extends the desktop metaphor of the graphical user interface to make tasks, not files and folders, the primary unit of interaction. Instead of showing entire hierarchies of information, such as a tree of documents, a task-focused interface shows the subset of the tree that is relevant to the task-at-hand. This addresses the problem of information overload when dealing with large hierarchies, such as those in software systems or large sets of documents. The task-focused interface is composed of a mechanism which allows the user to specify the task being worked on and to switch between active tasks, a model of the task context such as a degree-of-interest (DOI) ranking, a focusing mechanism to filter or highlight the relevant documents. The task-focused interface has been validated with statistically significant increases to knowledge worker productivity. It has been broadly adopted by programmers and is a key part of the Eclipse integrated development environment. The technology is also referred to as the "task context" model and the "task-focused programming" paradigm.
Key claims
No claims recorded.
Discussion questions
- Summarise the article in your own words. Which single claim would you verify first, and why?
- Which claim in this article is most likely to be revised as the sources update? How would you check its current status?
- If two sources disagreed about one of these facts, what would you need in order to trust one over the other?
Bibliography
No sources recorded.
Key claims and bibliography are generated from the same tracked claims and sources as the article page.