Organize This! Investigating Usable Interfaces to Augment Cognition in Computer-supported Personal Information Practices

Rodney E. Peters, GVU Center and College of Computing, Georgia Institute of Technology

About Personal Information Management (PIM)

"That pile of paper ... went on living like the watch on a dead soldier's wrist." - Jean Cocteau

Many people are inundated with information today forcing them to sort, filter, read, answer, store and discard information they come in contact with during their daily routines. Using every tool, artefact, or technological innovation that appears useful, people are moving, shifting, enlarging, reducing, maximizing, minimizing, modifying, storing, and deleting the facts that comprise personal information. Individuals who are not trained to cope with large volumes of data or have ineffective organizational skills browse through vast quantities of information in the real world or cyber-world to locate items of interest or value. This is often a very time consuming and frustrating task.

To read more about the foundation for this effort, click on the following link to read the CHI 2001 poster. CHI Paper submission in PDF format.

Motivation

There must be a way to better help people:

     (1) remember where information has been stored;
     (2) implicate the information's temporal importance and priority;
     (3) discover or identify a tool’s affordances that may assist in the management process;
     (4) and manage information-related tasks.

With the advent of the Internet and other distributed communication applications such as email, instant messaging services, and the World Wide Web (WWW), the amount of this distributed information (in addition to paper documents) has increased dramatically [5]. And, this information competes for people’s attention, motivating them to adjust their daily routines in order to deal with the overload or at least to minimize its impact. Now, people must be more creative and imaginative in using existing tools and toward discovering new methods that will improve this daily management task. Above all, people want to build strategies and use tools that process information in a timely, speedy and reliable manner that is natural to them in whatever particular situation they might be [1].

Information management has become an even more challenging task due to the volume of information available and the inexorable increase in complexity of the tasks to interact with it. And, human cognitive ability has not increased to keep pace with these technological demands.

Source: Buxton, W. “Less is More (More or Less): Some Thoughts on the
Design of Computers and the Future”, in P. Denning (Ed.), The Invisible Future:
The seamless integration of technology in everyday life. New York: McGraw Hill.

What if…

you could store your life record and use it to construct representations of specific events, tasks, or time periods;
instead of searching directories, people request records referenced to a cognitively-anchored, memory representation;
the “usable interface” was visually representative of the data record in a manner natural to the user (i.e., a cognitive prosthetic device).

Scenarios

Office

Elizabeth opened the door to her undergraduate administration office and stumbled over the boxes placed on her floor. The phone was ringing and she rushed to pick up the receiver. She noticed that placed on top of the telephone was a post-it note telling her that Dean Regis urgently needed to contact her concerning the deployment of the new programming language class curriculum. "Now where did I save that data on the current student progress this quarter?" she asked. Sitting down at her desk, Elizabeth notes that she left her email application open and that 15 new messages had accumulated in the inbox. Scanning through the subject lines of the email she sees where the Dean has sent her a note presumably about the student data. Opening the email, Elizabeth has been requested to make a presentation concerning the student success and failure data that had been gathered to date. Looking down at the boxes in the floor she realizes that most of the supporting data is sorted in different boxes but has been organized by date and class number. However, other materials have been placed in her filing cabinet. Individual files have been created for items that have been periodically received but no overall structure was used to organize a file drawer. She wonders "I really need to start indexing these materials better so that I or anyone else can pull this stuff together faster." In order for her to put together the presentation, Elizabeth must sort through the piles that have formed in her floor, sift her email contained in her inbox as well as folders and search the file cabinet hoping her memory does not fail her.

Home

Molly loves to cook and share recipes with everyone she knows.. She has been collecting recipes for many years and placed them in boxes, envelopes; whatever she could find that would fit in the available storage space. Molly often received recipes from close friends with letters, email or snail mail, telling her how family and friends were getting along. She really didn't know what to do with the paper letters but would place them in a shoe box in her closet for safe keeping. The emails she would receive she would just leave them in her inbox. It has grown very large over the passing years. She really likes using email to contact her friends and send recipes she finds exciting. Molly's mom would often call asking about a recipe that she had forgotten and Molly would try to find it. People are always contacting her to help them with a menu for a dinner party or some other special event. Storing and retrieving recipes has become a major task for her. "Wouldn't it be great if I could organize this information linking people, places and events. My life would be so much easier!" she would say. Molly also had to be careful with allergies that people had. Joe her son could not eat anything with cinnamon in it but Katie, her daughter, loves homemade cinnamon rolls and pumpkin pie. Only the recipes that she used very often received counter space in the kitchen so that they were always available to her. Otherwise she would have to go dig up a recipe from the various storage places she had made and hope that she did not have to go through too many to find the right one. Often, she would keep receipts for what she paid to produce a meal. At the end of each year, her husband would come and ask her these receipts to help complete her the family taxes each year and it was a big struggle to find them all.

Qualitative Research Field Study

To explore and learn more about how people store and retrieve all types of information, in-depth interviews with a variety of individuals from different backgrounds were conducted. We sought a diversity of people representing a variety of cultures and backgrounds having a wide range of careers to participate in the study. As the study was constructed to gain an understanding of organizational strategies in information management, 25 participants were selected from a pool of volunteers who indicated that information management activities were important to them. The study demographics were:

14 female, 11 male subjects
Ages ranging from 21 to 65 years of age
Diverse backgrounds and job descriptions including student, teacher, media specialist, research scientist, administrative assistant, office coordinator, department head, chiropractor, engineer, professor, manager

All of the participants in the study had a working knowledge of personal computers and were thus familiar with organizational strategies used in both a paper-based and an electronic storage media environment. The research challenges for this study were to establish trends and patterns in tasks of artefact interaction that indicate people use similar processes to construct and manage their information space. The identification of these management patterns will help identify the design requirements for future PIM tools and reveal obstacles that may hinder the management activity. The primary goals of the interview process were to:

Identify unique organizational practices and strategies.
Identify practices that transfer between working locations.
Identify the types of information present.
Identify what artefacts are being generated.
Assess the motivation of the participant for improving their PIM skills or tools.

For the study results, go here ->DIS 2002 Paper

Related Work

There has been a lot of research performed and papers written concerning the area of information management in terms of the business world. Additionally, there has been a large body of work written and published about qualitative research and the activity of informing design through field studies. The following is an evolving list of references that I have found useful to this research effort. The list will continue to grow as I find additional work relevant to the effort and my understanding of the problems and issues expands.

1. Abrams, D,,Baecker, R., and Chignell, M. "Information Archiving with Bookmarks: Personal Web Space Construction and Organization", in CHI '98 Conference Proceedings, Los Angeles, CA, 1998, pages 41 - 48.
2. Barreau, Deborah and Nardi, Bonnie A. "Finding and reminding: File organization from the desktop" In SIGCHI Bulletin. SIGCHI, July 1995.
3. Bellotti, Victoria and Smith, Ian. "Informing the Design of an Information Management System with Iterative Fieldwork", Boyarski, D.; Kellogg, W.; eds. Proceedings of the 3rd Conference on Designing Interactive Systems; 2000 August 17-19; New York, NY. NY: ACM; 2000; 227-237.
4. Gwizdka, J. "Timely Reminders: A Case Study of Temporal Guidance in PIM and Email Tools Usage," Proceedings of CHI'2000, Extended Abstracts. ACM Press.
5. Richard Mander, Gitta Salomon, and Yin Yin Wong. "The Pile Metaphor for Supporting Casual Organization of Information. ACM CHI'92 Proceedings, pages 627-634, May 1992.
6. Markus, M.L., and Keil, M., "If We Build It, They Will Come: Designing Information Systems That Users Want To Use," Sloan Management Review, Vol. 35, No. 4, Summer 1994, pp. 11-25.
7. Nardi, B., Anderson, K. and Erickson, T. Filing and Finding Computer Files. Proceedings East-West Conference on Human- Computer Interaction, Moscow, Russia, 4-8 July 1995.
8. Whittaker, S., and Sidner, C. "Email Overload: exploring personal information management of email", Proceedings of the ACM CHI96 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. New York, NY, ACM Press. 276-283.

Contact Information

Rodney E. Peters

repeters@cc.gatech.edu

Phone: (404) 385-2447