Personal Information Management
• What’s on your PIM?
• Readings review
What’s on your PIM?
- Contact info
• Phone
• Fax
• Email
• Address(es)
- To Do
- Meetings
- Lists
- Reminders
- Email
- Documents
• Music
• Video
• Text
• Other formats
All your PIM are belong to us
• Connections?
- How are the bits interlinked?
- How do they get into the PIM?
• All in one place?
- Is centralized necessarily better?
• Client or Server approach?
Life beyond the mailbox
• Email isn’t the only way to organize your
schedule or information
• What if it were the only way?
• One interface isn’t enough. Modes.
• Email is the first thing we think of when trying
to solve a communication or organization
problem
- Victim of its own success
- Failure at its own aims
Reference tasks with multiple tools
• How to organize information
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Folders
Time
Person
Project
User-defined
• Reminders
- Notification
- Completion
- Tracking
• Towards an Activity Space
Users constrained by PIMs
• One application for everything
• Too much or too little compartmentalization
• How do users organize docs, email, &
bookmarks?
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Folders, unfiled items, lost items?
High volume challenges
Folder overlap – role, project, interest
Why not aliases?
• Users feel untidy?
• UI & functionality across tools
• Activity sequence among tools
PIM Features
• Integrating even more into email?
- Focal points of activity
- Easiest to notice changes?
• Workspace Mirror
- The categories problem
- Too much flexibility?
• Context dependent tools
- How do you note context?
- Can the system determine context?
• Project Management as overall activity
Lifestreams
• Is the desktop metaphor broken?
- Complexity of (multiple) applications
- Modality of tasks & file formats
• Documents organized by time
- What are documents?
• Subsets interlinked
• PIM-like information
- Another kind of paper?
• Stream filters
- Organize, locate, summarize & monitor incoming
information
- What about already present information?
Lifestreams Ideas
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Storage should be transparent
Directories are bad for organizing
Automatic archiving
Grouping documents
Reminding convenience (UI integration)
Personal data should be available
- Viewports on network
- Device independent
• Compatibility ease
Lifestreams model
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New, clone, transfer, find & summarize
Directories on demand
(Complex) Ad hoc queries
Dynamic substreams – automatic, continuous
organization
• Summarization by substream – bundling
• Document lifetime past, present, future (to do)
Scopeware
Info Archiving with Bookmarks
• Small, Older Study
- 50 Bookmarkers
- 300+ Web Users
• How People Create, Use and Organize Bookmarks
• Bookmarks Are One Method to Make Sense of the
Web
- Supporting Searching
- Supporting Browsing
• Help with Mental Model of the Web
• A “Personal Web Information Space”
Abrams, Baecker & Chignell (1998)
Info Archiving with Bookmarks (2)
• Why Bookmarks?
- Frequently Used Pointers
• Easy to Make
• Easy to Use
- Archives
• Topics of Interests
• Aging Interests (forever)
• Paths Through the Web (over time)
• What Bookmarks?
- Distinct Domain Names
- Index or Search Engines
- Front/Main (News) Pages
Info Archiving with Bookmarks (3)
• Methods for Organizing Bookmarks
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None
Ordered List (re-arranged)
Sets & Folders
Hierarchy (Nested Folders)
External Web Page(s)
Other System(s)
• More Bookmarks Require More Organization
Methods
Info Archiving with Bookmarks (4)
• Bookmark Filing Strategies
- None – Never – Natural Order
- At Creation Time
• Folders
• Labels
- At End of Browsing Session
• More Folders
• More Time
- When Bookmark Sets Become Unwieldy
• Randomly
• Scheduled
• Archival Use
- 100 Day Median
- About Half Visited in the Last Three Months
- Almost All Within the Last Year
Info Archiving with Bookmarks (5)
• Organizing Bookmarks
- Only When Necessary
- Tradeoff Against Not Finding a Bookmark
• Finding Bookmarks
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Names of Bookmarks Not Always Descriptive
Folders Difficult to Navigate
Remembering Bookmark Location Challenging
Recalling Exact Bookmark Name Unlikely
Info Archiving with Bookmarks (6)
• How to Enable & Expand Bookmarking Functions?
- Taxonomy-Classification
- Automatic Bookmarking
- Agents
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“My” Web (Site – Nav Bar)
Bookmarking As Poaching
Sharing With Others (email)
Should We Bookmark at All?
- Search Engines Are More Efficient
- Web Use History (if extended) Show Prior Accesses
- Interfaces Don’t Scale for Volume
• Implications for IA?
How do people organize their desks?
• Does everyone organize differently?
- Their desks?
- Their computers?
• Organization extremes
- Files, forms & paperflow
- Piles as archives
• Time to organize vs access time
• Reminding, not just finding
- In sight, in mind
- Location ca be a cue to time
• Categorization is difficult for everyone
- Leaving things out to not classify
Find and Remind
• Classification
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Automatic
Format forced
Multiple
Deferred
• Notification
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Frequency of task
Priority of task
Size and importance
Color, format, labels for differences and notice
Keeping found things found
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Managing information for re-use
Finding things again vs. re-searching
How many ways can we work around PIM?
Focus on Email and titles from the Web
Using browsers and email clients
Portability, access points, persistence
Currency and reminding frequency
Users were constrained by tool functionality
- Too much flexibility?
- Too many tools?
How they did it
Agenda & the history of PIMs
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First and foremost?
Good, bad and definitely ugly
Foundation for Notes
What about Magellan?
Free form too free?
PIM Harmony
• Integration among tools
- Formats
- Importing and Exporting
• Integration for tasks
- Sequences
- Automation
• Integration among users
- Shared contacts, bookmarks, lists, filters
- Common formats or meta information