YouPivot began, as an idea, back in 2005. For his final project in Software Architecture for User Interfaces (or SAUI) at Carnegie Mellon, Josh created a new UI wrapper for OSX called
WISE(a Wizard Interface Supporting Enhanced Usability). WISE was designed to help accommodate for multiple age related challenges (e.g. color impairment, memory impairment, novice computer users, etc.) One of the key features of WISE was a history bar, that allowed users to see all the steps they went through to get to the current “screen” in WISE. To validate the design the following summer, during an internship at IBM T.J. Watson research with Vicki Hanson, Josh performed a user study with older adults. Across all subjects, the History Bar was viewed as a great feature that users wanted to have in their own computers at home.Over the next two years, as a Graduate Student at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, the History Bar Project (as it was then called) was going through constant iterations. What would a generic history bar look like? How would users search or interact with it? What type of data should be collected? In 2008, Joshua met with
Aaron Benjamin, a professor in psychology who studies human memory. Professor Benjamin pointed Josh to a series of articles and authors who have studied the relationship between contextual cues and human memory. Using this new information, Josh began to design new systems and interfaces that would leverage our natural method of contextual recall.
That summer, while an intern at Google, Josh began working with Nicholas Jitkoff on developing underlying technologies to create a new type of search tool based on the cognitive science literature. Their collaboration focused on modeling human behavior on the computer, and relating it to human memory. This research, called The Clotho Project, was subsequently published at DIS in 2010. The followup project Lachesis, is currently under submission to a journal.
In 2010, Josh returned to Google with a focus on developing a functional version of this contextual search history bar, now named YouPivot. Over the summer internship, Josh designed, and built a fully functional version of YouPivot utilizing Chrome and Google AppEngine. This system was subsequently published at the CHI 2011 conference.
Currently, YouPivot is being rebuilt into a stable public release with the aid of Maurice Lam and Abraham Fine. In addition, new features and interaction techniques are being incorporated in to this latest version of YouPivot.
