Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories

Tovi Grossman, Justin Matejka, George Fitzmaurice

January 2010 · Proceedings of the 23nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST)

Abstract

We describe Chronicle, a new system that allows users to explore document workflow histories. Chronicle captures the entire video history of a graphical document, and provides links between the content and the relevant areas of the history. Users can indicate specific content of interest, and see the workflows, tools, and settings needed to reproduce the associated results, or to better understand how it was constructed to allow for informed modification. Thus, by storing the rich information regarding the document's history workflow, Chronicle makes any working document a potentially powerful learning tool. We outline some of the challenges surrounding the development of such a system, and then describe our implementation within an image editing application. A qualitative user study produced extremely encouraging results, as users unanimously found the system both useful and easy to use.

DOI PDF

Figures

Figure 1. Chronicle. a) main Chronicle window, b) the timeline, c) application/Playback window.

Figure 2. A chronicle. a) before and b) after thumbnails. c) Icons represent the tools used in the revisions. d) layer information. e) hierarchy button.

Figure 3. In playback mode, the video is overlaid directly on top of the main application, with a green skin indicating the mode.

Figure 4. Chronicle UI controls: a) Data probe. b) UI probe. c) Selection probe. d) Refresh Revisions. e) Clear Video. f) Calendar View.

Figure 5. a) Data probe. b) Holding down the control key changes the probe into an in-place lens revealing the previous states under its region, and the user can scroll forwards and backwards in time.

Figure 6. The filter tab provides UI controls to filter by time, layers, users, tools, and workflows.

Figure 7. The expanded timeline, showing a zoomed in view after expanding one of the chronicles. This view represents 25 minutes of usage time.

Figure 8. Sample tooltips for: a) action marker, b) tool marker, c) setting marker, d) save point, e) user marker, f) color marker.

Figure 9. Tooltip for a dialog marker. A red phosphor effect is used to highlight which of the values within the dialog box have been changed.

Figure 10. When the cursor hovers over the ellipse tool event marker, previous setting events which effected that tool are highlighted. A halo [3] indicates the existence of an additional relevant set

Figure 11. The calendar view shows what the document looked like at the end of each day. Note: The illustrated document was created across a span of 4 days, and we manually altered each save date so t

BibTeX

@inproceedings{10.1145/1866029.1866054,
 abstract = {We describe Chronicle, a new system that allows users to explore document workflow histories. Chronicle captures the entire video history of a graphical document, and provides links between the content and the relevant areas of the history. Users can indicate specific content of interest, and see the workflows, tools, and settings needed to reproduce the associated results, or to better understand how it was constructed to allow for informed modification. Thus, by storing the rich information regarding the document's history workflow, Chronicle makes any working document a potentially powerful learning tool. We outline some of the challenges surrounding the development of such a system, and then describe our implementation within an image editing application. A qualitative user study produced extremely encouraging results, as users unanimously found the system both useful and easy to use.},
 address = {New York, NY, USA},
 author = {Grossman, Tovi and Matejka, Justin and Fitzmaurice, George},
 booktitle = {Proceedings of the 23nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology},
 doi = {10.1145/1866029.1866054},
 isbn = {9781450302715},
 keywords = {chronicle, history, timeline, workflow, video},
 location = {New York, New York, USA},
 numpages = {10},
 pages = {143–152},
 publisher = {Association for Computing Machinery},
 series = {UIST '10},
 title = {Chronicle: Capture, Exploration, and Playback of Document Workflow Histories},
 url = {https://doi.org/10.1145/1866029.1866054},
 year = {2010}
}