User Interface Support for Todays Crazed Information Worker: From Scatterbrained to Focused

Today's information workers are characterized by their ability to easily handle interruptions, multi-task, switch tasks quickly, and make sense of enormous amounts of information in high-pressure situations. Current and future technologies, including various wearables and sensing devices, ensure that robust communications and information transmissions can occur almost anywhere, any time. Our ability to log, collect, and visualize event data has become more sophisticated, allowing us to analyze trends and identify patterns across many areas of individual and group behaviors.
How do we use these technological trends to ensure that we are designing tools that improve productivity, insight, and an overall sense of user control? In this talk, Mary discusses her research group's approach to the user-centered design of advanced user interfaces, and she describes several of their research projects.
Mary Czerwinski is a principal researcher and manager of the Visualization and Interaction Research group at Microsoft Research. The group is responsible for studying and designing advanced technology and interaction techniques that leverage human capabilities across a wide variety of input and output channels. Mary's primary research areas include spatial cognition, information visualization and task switching. Mary has been an affiliate professor at the Department of Psychology, University of Washington since 1996. She has also held positions at Compaq, Rice University, Lockheed Engineering and Sciences Corporation, and Bell Communications Research. She received a Ph.D. in cognitive psychology.