Activity River: Visualizing Planned and Logged Personal Activities for Reflection

Bon Adriel Aseniero, Charles Perin, Wesley Willett, Anthony Tang, and Sheelagh Carpendale. (2020). Activity River: Visualizing Planned and Logged Personal Activities for Reflection. In AVI 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces, 10 pages. Notes: Honourable mention.

Abstract

We present Activity River, a personal visualization tool which enables individuals to plan, log and reflect on their own self-defined activities. We are interested in supporting this type of reflective practice as prior work has shown that reflection can help people plan and manage their time effectively. Hence, we designed Activity River based on five design goals (visualize historical and contextual data, provide a comparative view, use delightful visuals, support authorship, and enable open-ended planning and logging) which we distilled from the Information Visualization and Human–Computer Interaction literature. To explore our approach’s strengths and limitations, we conducted a qualitative study of Activity River using role-playing. Through this qualitative exploration, we illustrate how our participants envisioned using our visualization approach to perform dynamic and continuous reflection on their activities. We observed they were able assess their progress towards their plans and adapt to unforeseen circumstances using our tool.

Materials

PDF File (http://hcitang.org/papers/2020-avi2020-aseniero-activity-river.pdf)

BibTeX

@inproceedings{aseniero2020activityriver,
  author = {Aseniero, Bon Adriel and Perin, Charles and Willett, Wesley and Tang, Anthony and Carpendale, Sheelagh},
  title = {Activity River: Visualizing Planned and Logged Personal Activities for Reflection},
  booktitle = {AVI 2020: Proceedings of the 2020 International Conference on Advanced Visual Interfaces},
  year = {2020},
  pages = {10 pages},
  type = {conference},
  pdfurl = {http://hcitang.org/papers/2020-avi2020-aseniero-activity-river.pdf},
  notes = {Honourable mention}
}