Window Watcher: A Visualisation Tool for Understanding Windowing Activities

摘要

Almost all actions on a computer are mediated by windows, yet we know surprisingly little about how people coordinate their activities using these windows. Studies of window use are difficult for two reasons: gathering longitudinal data is problematic and it is unclear how to extract meaningful characterisations from the data. In this paper, we present a visualisation tool called Window Watcher that helps researchers understand and interpret low level event logs of window switching activities generated by our tool PyLogger. We describe its design objectives and demonstrate ways that it summarises and elucidates window use.