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Jaime Teevan, Ph.D. teevan@microsoft.com Blog, Twitter: @jteevan One Microsoft Way Redmond, WA 98052 (425) 421-9299 |
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| New Future of Work In March 2020, people across the globe experienced a rapid shift to remote work that upended their existing work practices. Now some are returning to the workplace and work practices are starting to change once again - this time from remote to hybrid. Hybrid work presents a whole new set of questions and challenges: Individuals determining the best place for them to do different aspects of their jobs, teams figuring out how to coordinate and make the best use of their in-office time, and groups trying to have effective and inclusive hybrid meetings. The current moment presents an opportunity to create a new and better future of work that empowers the people who return to working in an office, those that stay remote, and those that find the mix of the two that works for them and their team. (For more, see http://aka.ms/nfw and publications: hybrid work, human-AI interaction) | |
| Microproductivity Many of the chunks of time we have in a day are too short to bother trying to use productively. Think of the time you spend waiting for a meeting to start, riding in an elevator, or standing in line. We try to defrag our time by booking meetings with ourselves, turning off our phones, and taking email vacations. But there is another way. Rather than fighting fragmentation by changing how we work, we can embrace it by changing our tasks to fit the way we actually do work. We do this by algorithmically breaking large productivity tasks down into a series of smaller microtasks. The component microtasks can then be completed by the task owner via selfsourcing or the crowd via crowdsourcing. The transformation of information work into microwork will change when and how people work, and enable individuals and automated processes to efficiently and easily complete tasks that currently seem challenging. (For more, see publications: microproductivity, crowdsourcing, personal information management) | |
| Slow Search We expect search engines to return results instantaneously, and people perceive results that are delivered quickly as higher quality and more engaging than those delivered more slowly. To meet our expectations, search engines make many compromises to shave milliseconds off their response time. It is ironic that a few milliseconds matter so much when over half of our interactions with a search engine involve multiple queries and take minutes or even hours. There is an opportunity to slow the search experience down and help searchers take the necessary time to learn as they search, gather information from multiple sources, and explore tangents, as well as to algorithmically identify high quality, personally relevant information over extended periods of time. (For more, see publications: slow search, personalized search, re-finding, serendipity, social search) |