Findings:
 - Participants’ existing mobile work practices are mainly exploratory while their desired work practices are more grounded; 
 - Continuation is primarily facilitated through email by transferring captured thoughts and online research; and 
 - Resumption of interrupted work is facilitated with their mobile work practices.

Macalester College

1. Contextual Inquiry 
2. Online Survey 
3. Mercury Design 
4. Experiment Design 
5. Evaluation


Methodology (Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity)

Williams, A., Kaur, H., Iqbal, S., White, R., Teevan, J., Fourney, A., (2019) Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity. University of Waterloo, University of Michigan, Microsoft Research. UIST '19, October 20–23, 2019, New Orleans, LA, USA. DOI: 10.1145/3332165.3347932

Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity

The findings of the pre-studies revealed:
- participants often engage in activities outside of their primary workspace to make progress of software development tasks using mobile devices, but they rarely interact with code; 
-  their existing practices require better support for continuation of programming tasks; and, 
-  because of the difficulties in task continuation across devices, they minimize what they need to resume after both mobile and non-mobile work experiences. 


Contextual Inquiry (Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity)

Online Survey (Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity)

1. Mercury is composed of two primary sub-systems: 1) a MeteorJS web application that manages all web requests, serves the front-end mobile experience, and handles information synchronization between web clients and a Mongo NoSQL database; and 2) a VSCode plugin that converts the VSCode workspace into a web client that shares workspace state with the server.
2. Mercury introduces two, novel selfsourcing microtasks: exploratory microtasks and grounded microtasks


Mercury Design (Mercury: Empowering Programmers’ Mobile Work Practices with Microproductivity)

1. Experiment design: Phase I 30 minutes work on computer on programming task, Phase II interruption and transition to mobile work, Phase III coming back to original working station. 
2. Programming task → tetris.
3. Post-study questionnaire and post-study interview.
4. Only one participan was able to finish in time. 


Learn Before

Related