Using Vocabularies to Collaboratively Create Better Plans for Writing Tasks

Harmanpreet Kaur, Alex C. Williams, Anne Loomis Thompson, Walter S. Lasecki, Shamsi T. Iqbal, Jaime Teevan

Abstract: Having a step-by-step list of instructions for completing a task - a plan - enables people to make progress on challenging tasks, but making plans for tasks is a tedious job. Asking crowdworkers to make plans for others' tasks only works for independent (context-free) tasks, and asking people who have context (e.g., friends or collaborators) has social costs and quality concerns. Our goal is to reduce the costs and improve quality of planning by people who have context in the context-rich domain of writing. We introduce a vocabulary (a finite set of functions pertaining to writing tasks) to aid the planning process. We develop a writing vocabulary by analyzing 264 comments, and compare plans created using this vocabulary to those created without any aid, in a study with 768 comments (N=145). We show that using a vocabulary reduces the planning time and effort compared to unstructured planning, and opens the door for automation and task sharing for complex tasks.