AppInsight: what have I been doing?

ABSTRACT

In this paper we present AppInsight, a visualization tool that enables users to reminisce on their computer usage history and derive meaningful insights about behaviors and trends. Human memory has the ability to re-experience episodes from our lives when supplied with suitable contextual cues, such as places, music, and so on. We explore a small set of properties, such as the application's name, URL and window title as contextual cues, in order to characterize the users' activity on their personal computers and how it evolves over time. Our user study shows that users enjoyed viewing their computer usage history and were able to both recall past events and introspect about their lives. Moreover, one of the most surprising outcomes is that they found several different applications for our tool, such as improving usage behaviors, controlling productivity, generating activity reports, and monitoring users in psychological studies. Finally, we discuss some lessons learned from our study and propose future research directions.

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Index Terms

• Human-centered computing

  • Human computer interaction (HCI)