Task-Focused Interface

The task-focused interface is a type of user interface which extends the desktop metaphor of the graphical user interface to make tasks, not files and folders, the primary unit of interaction. Instead of showing entire hierarchies of information, such as a tree of documents, a task-focused interface shows the subset of the tree that is relevant to the task-at-hand. This addresses the problem of information overload when dealing with large hierarchies, such as those in software systems or large sets of documents. The task-focused interface is composed of a mechanism which allows the user to specify the task being worked on and to switch between active tasks, a model of the task context such as a degree-of-interest (DOI) ranking, a focusing mechanism to filter or highlight the relevant documents. The task-focused interface has been validated with statistically significant increases to knowledge worker productivity. It has been broadly adopted by programmers and is a key part of the Eclipse integrated development environment. The technology is also referred to as the "task context" model and the "task-focused programming" paradigm.

The task-focused interface was invented by Mik Kersten during his PhD at the University of British Columbia in 2004. Kersten previously worked on the aspect-oriented programming team at Xerox PARC and combined the idea of crosscutting aspects and task management. Early precursors to the task-focused interface include the attention-reactive interface metaphor and the "Edit & Read Wear" document editing tool.

The first description of the task-focused interface concepts appeared in a 2005 AOSD conference publication. The first implementation of the task-focused interface started as an open source project called Eclipse Mylyn, created in March 2005. The technology evolved with input and contributions from thousands of open source community developers. In 2006, a research group and the University of Victoria demonstrated the utility of the task-focused interface and degree-of-interest model for ontology visualization. In 2007, the Mylyn implementation was bundled with the majority of Eclipse IDE distributions. In 2008, alternate implementations of task-focused interface became available, including NetBeans Cubeon, and the Tasktop Pro tool for project managers. By 2009, most agile software development and application lifecycle management tools provided integration with Mylyn. In 2011 NBTaskFocus got introduced which provided Mylyn like task-focused features in NetBeans IDE.

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