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ScreenTrack: Using Visual History for Self-tracking Computer Activities and Retrieving Working Context

Reconstructing a previous working context (files, websites and software) when resuming a task is inevitable for computer users after switching software or being interrupted. The process of retrieving relevant applications, files, and web pages can be time-consuming; while users may be able to use a "recent documents" feature to resume work in some applications, it is challenging to find relevant information from a text-based history --- file names, web page titles, or URLs may not be informative enough. To address this problem, we tested the idea of using a visual history of a computer screen through the development of ScreenTrack. ScreenTrack is software that captures an image of a computer screen at regular intervals. It lets a user watch and navigate a time-lapse video made of computer screenshots to retrieve a previous working context from a screenshot. Through a controlled user study, it was found that participants were able to retrieve requested information more quickly with ScreenTrack than the control condition; this difference was statistically significant. Additionally, participants gave positive feedback on possible future uses for this software. We present the software, our preliminary user study result, and a plan for further validation.