TaskLight: A Groupware System to Facilitate Requesting and Managing Help in Teams

Abstract

People working in collaborative settings often have to request help from their colleagues due to their expertise or authority. Previous research in request management found that a performer (a person who is asked to conduct a task) would benefit from meta-data about the request. In this work, we use requesters’ motivation to help their performers and their goodwill to construct informative requests; in turn, performers are able to better and more efficiently finish tasks.

We propose a collaborative request management tool called TaskLight, where requesters can provide and curate contextual information for performers. Performers are able to prioritize and manage requests based on information provided and also easily collect additional information through nuanced discussion and negotiation around requests, if necessary. The design of TaskLight is inspired by preliminary interviews with individuals who were part of collaborative settings, in order to understand their current practices of requesting help and using tools. We further investigate how different models of request can assist performers’ attention management via a field study. We demonstrate the diverse use cases of TaskLight through implementations of requests such as collaborative writing, getting approvals, and making group decisions. We derive insights via a user study from our first deployed version of TaskLight and use it as a stepping stone for future direction of work.