Activity River: Visualizing Planned and Logged Personal Activities for Reflection

TL;DR

Activity River is a visualization tool designed to help individuals plan, log, and reflect on their personal activities, supporting effective time management through engaging visualizations and flexible logging features.

Contribution

We introduce Activity River, a novel visualization tool that facilitates personal activity reflection and planning, grounded in design principles from visualization and HCI literature.

Findings

Participants used Activity River to assess progress and adapt plans.

The tool supported dynamic and continuous reflection on activities.

Participants found the visualizations engaging and helpful for reflection.

Abstract

We present Activity River, a personal visualization tool which enables individuals to plan, log, and reflect on their self-defined activities. We are interested in supporting this type of reflective practice as prior work has shown that reflection can help people plan and manage their time effectively. Hence, we designed Activity River based on five design goals (visualize historical and contextual data, facilitate comparison of goals and achievements, engage viewers with delightful visuals, support authorship, and enable flexible planning and logging) which we distilled from the Information Visualization and Human-Computer Interaction literature. To explore our approach's strengths and limitations, we conducted a qualitative study of Activity River using a role-playing method. Through this qualitative exploration, we illustrate how our participants envisioned using our visualization to perform dynamic and continuous reflection on their activities. We observed that they were able to assess their progress towards their plans and adapt to unforeseen circumstances using our tool.