How does PIM Enter Into People’s Lives?
Wen-Chi Pan
Dec.10. 2008
Introduction
The Internet has revolutionized people’s lives. Before personal information
management (PMI) was introduced to the areas of research and business, most
people used traditional methods to manage their personal information.
Eventually, the Internet led to many online PIM tools. People began using these
online PIM systems and the demand for tools to help them manage the
overwhelming daily information grew. The integration of Internet and people
changed the way people interacted with information and in turn, changed their
lives.
The interactions between people and PIMs
Not very long ago, there was a prediction that paper would disappear some
day and be replaced by new technologies. Despite the digital resources and
technological devices today, people still use papers for their everyday work. This
reflects the user behavior of personal information management. Because the
trend of button-up information structures came from web 2.0, researchers began
to notice issues of PIM system usability. It also provided the opportunity to
overcome the obscurity of internal knowledge within organizational knowledge
management systems.
Although there are more and more open or business applications for
personal information management, the traditional physical organizing tools still
play important roles in people’s lives, especially “paper.” “Traditions are not
always bad” surprisingly has shown true in this field. Despite the availability of
impressive new technology, humble paper tools such as day-timers, notepads
and folders are still used by most people (Bellotti and Smith 2000). The
convenience of data IO (input and output) and availability by paper are difficult to
surpass with current computer-based media. Bellotti and Smith (2000) found
people though that the laptops are too intrusive for note-taking and PDAs are
too slow in their in-depth interviews. According to prior studies [3], people still
use a lot of paper-based tools to organize their information or keep track of
scheduled meetings. For example, they use memos on the wall as to-do lists
and pile related documents on the desk to present the ongoing tasks. Although
the result showed that people use many online or offline applications to help
them manage their tasks (including e-calendar, email or open windows), the
paper-based reminders still play important roles in personal information
management. The result also showed that email, notes on paper and e-calendar
were more popular on average for to-do lists, but that some tasks didn’t require
reminders. For these tasks, people only wanted to use their heads. The study
pointed out that the reason users prefer papers is because paper provides a free
input format and also is very accessible. Users don’t tend to spend a lot of time
inputting the details and they are also poor at estimating time required doing a
task.
Computer-based PIM Applications
The initial function of PIM was a focus on file management, but people
really began using PIM applications for task management and notes, such as
calendars, contacts, and to-do lists. In addition, online PIM systems have a
powerful ability to help users complete their group works efficiently through the
Internet.
Many user behavior studies show that people usually collect and organize
their documents by projects. Other methods of organization include specific
purposes, events or organizations/people are also another kind of important
organizing catalogs. Just like in the daily work environment, people classify
documents by different topic and pile them on the desks, or separate them by
priorities. Due to these user study results, many designs of PIM applications
started becoming task-based.
The Bellotti [3] study, the studies examined the different PIM media/tools
and tracked how tasks are completed over time and finally toward a task list
manager concept named TaskVista. They found out that the task list manager
should have some characteristics to meet the users’ information managing
habits and provide more benefits by system support. These implications for task
list manger design included the diverse ways to view and manipulate to-dos,
being able to make the to-do schedules in-the-way and capture the time
constrains, having a mechanism for handling stale to-dos, and accept the instant
and informal task descriptions. This means the application should allow any
level of entries’ abstractions, like paper tool does. Besides, they also concluded
that contrary to the prior researches, people are not poor at prioritizing. The
problem with task management is how to assist people in completing the
important tasks efficiently with task manager’s support. People express great
concern about this problem, which if surmounted leads users to start using PIM
tools.
The need for collaborative tools motivated the development of online
calendars. There are myriad different solutions for scheduling amongst people,
and many of them use more than one method. The e-calendar seems very
useful for organize meetings, and that’s the main purpose of a group calendar.
Online calendars support workflow in knowledge management The Internet
frees collaborative work from time and location constraints, but that also
emphasizes the importance of information update and synchronization.
Teamwork requires more than what is required for managing personal
information and scheduling, and online calendars provide convenient interfaces
to solve temporal issues created by collaborative work. Google Calendar uses
colorful labels to identify different working projects or responsibilities. From the
aspect of group information management, Google Calendar separates individual
process in the workflow and the group schedule for the users who have
authority; and from the Personal information management perspective, it gives
tasks different labels to emphasize each task and match task-based habits in
PIM user studies.
Aside from the calendar applications, another general tool for managing
collaboration is email. Email’s inclusion with PIM may have started with an
accident. The initial email system was developed for exchanging the “electronic
mail” and files, just like the post mail in the real world. However, email came to
be used for much more than this because of its convenience and functional
flexibility. “Outeraction” defined in the “Interaction and Outeraction Instant
Messaging Action (Bonnie A. Nardi and Bradner 2000)”: “…is a set of
communicative processes outside of information exchange, in which people
reach out to others in patently social ways to enable information exchange.”
There are many “things” (application or services) used for online work that
go beyond the original purposes for which they were designed. People use them
to help them organize and manage their personal information and make the
information easier to transfer and share.
Email was broadly used for communicating, exchanging messages and files
and becomes one of the most popular computer applications. The contacts and
calendar interfaces were usually already included in the email applications such
as Microsoft Outlook. It is apparent in that they integrate email and contacts
interfaces. On the other hand, many email user studies [1] [2] [3] [4] [9] found
out that users are comfortable with scheduling by email. Users use email
inboxes as a repository of “to-dos” and “to-reads” items (Bellotti, Duchenueat et
al. 2003).
Email users clearly feel overwhelmed and daunted by the time it takes to
deal with all the work coming in through email transactions. And email overload
and outaction create problems for personal information management.
Acknowledging these problems, many recent studies and projects have tried to
overhaul email’s interfaces. By the email triage design in [11], Carman and his
team applied the concept of social network analysis into the email triage system.
Recent work has begun to tackle the challenge of general task management at it
plays out in email (Bellotti, Dalal et al. 2004). Many projects embedded
task-based concept into email interfaces. Google’s Gmail treats email in the
inbox as many threads (tasks). Bellotti, V. and I. Smith (2000) thought, since
many responses they heard from their interviewees underlined the need for
embedded information management capabilities online in email. It seemed
email is the application that is most likely to be open at anytime. Combining
usability factors and the various functions of email, the design put email at its
core. The design and evaluation of PIM tools in another study [4], is an example
of a task-management-centered email tools.
Another interesting finding with email is that many users choose to use
web-based email rather than client-based email applications. Users are
beginning to access and manage their personal information on the Web. The
webmail systems built trust that they can storage users’ email safely, and
supported access to their account on any computer as long as they can connect
to the Internet.
The simplicity is also a factor for users. The success of webmail is due to
the webmail is very easy for using. The webmail interfaces don’t need user to
set the protocol data, such as POP3 or IMAP, which need to set in the general
complex email applications. On the other hand, many interviewees of Bellotti
and Smith (2000)’s study complained about the complexity of online calendars
or only used very basic and restricted functions. The reason is that people take
PIM applications as tools to help them improve efficiency, not to spend more
time on learning how to use.
Digitizing documents is hard work for users. People don’t like to spend time
transferring their information by either typing or scanning. In the Bellotti and
Smith (2000)’s initial design, their first design was a PDF that also supported
scanning. But they found their potential users weren’t interested in inputting data.
One good example is that people still use the business cards a lot to manage
some part of their contacts, because inputting the contact information is
time-consuming and the technology for converting pictures/ handwriting to
ASCII is not mature yet (Bellotti and Smith 2000). Compared with the time spent
on digitalizing, using the original paper documents like the business cards is
more efficient. Moreover, many people still “print out” their data even if they have
used PIM tools to manage information. The interview of (Bellotti and Smith 2000)
found that some interviewees used online group calendaring solutions, but
relied heavily on printed out copies to carry around. As the argument discussed
above, users choose to “output” the data for PIM system rather than “input.”
In fact, the opportunity for PIM applications came as more and more data
was born digital. People use the digital data directly acquired from the Web,
instead of digitalizing or inputting data. This revolution finally popularized PIM
applications over traditional information managing methods.
What makes people choose PIM applications?
Most people have a common habit between the ideal of working online and
the appreciation of the advantages of paper, but more and more documents are
acquired online through email or attachments, people usually read the short
ones online, but print out the longer ones. (Bellotti and Smith 2000)
The apparent preference of paper might be due to its attribute as a high
resolution, intuitive, lightweight, cheap and flexible medium. (Bellotti and Smith
2000) The designs of PIM applications have to use the advantage of paper to
make users change their information behavior. Their in-depth interviews also
showed that both online and tangible artifacts can be good reminders only when
they are “in-the-way” in the appropriate context. Users expect to spend less time
accessing data, and also less time for inputting, retrieving or re-acquiring. To-do
list should be visible (meet in-the-way); calendars should be on hand when
someone asks; contacts information should be right there when needed. The
most important this is that documents should be on the desktop or found in a few
seconds.
Paper continues to be used because it is ever-present and handy, and use
may be habitual. People have used paper to record information for thousands of
years. Ballotti and Smith (2000) found out that people want to use the PIM tool
in the same way as their real work environment. The e-calendar is a good
example. Other examples include note tools such as StickPad
(www.greeneclipsesoftware.com), which simulates the physical paper notes that
allow users “stick” to the note on the computer desktop.
The initial design concept of Ballotti and Smith was to build a paper-based
PDA with the purpose of task management. They tried to simulate scheduling
work according to the paper-format. But during the user study, they found out
that users didn’t response very well. The result means that although paper can’t
be totally replaced by computing system, there are still some advantages the
system that are better than paper. The most obvious is the organizing and
retrieving abilities. These are the major advantages for every information system.
Traditional cataloging cannot compare with high efficiency and powerful
capability of computing retrieval.
Besides simulating the physical work environment, people prefer to use
applications that are already open to support PIM rather than applications that
hive off information into separate, awkward-to-access structures such as contact
lists or to-do lists. “…A need for embedding better PIM capabilities in common
workplaces, which would include online applications such as email and
work-processors.” (Bellotti and Smith 2000) Similarly, web browsers require
users require users to constantly open them.
PIM goes online
The growth of the Internet brought the changes to PIM development; the
Web has a number of distinct advantages as the basis for information
collaboration. Web client programs (browsers) now are a basic component of
the computing environment and are available for all popular computing
platforms and operating systems. The user interfaces of browsers are simple
and offer consistent presentation for users, thus users usually don’t need to
install additional software to achieve their purposes with the Web. In addition,
many organizations have also installed their own Web server as part of an
Internet presence or a corporate Intranet. When the information processes need
to go into a bigger system such as a knowledge management system, the
organization already have the infrastructure and have familiarity with server
maintenance. (Bentley, Appelt et al. 1997)
Accessibility is the most impressive advantage of Online PIM. Through the
Internet, PIM systems transfer data to be another kind of “readily available”
system like paper tools. There are different reachable scopes between the
Internet and paper tools. Because of the device requirements and time
commitment problems, online PIM systems still have access problem, but online
PIM application creates another definition of readily available. The data stored
online can be accessed by any node through the Web. Many documents are
already created by computers, and their editability take online PIM applications
beyond paper-based information management. The stability of the Internet
encouraged people to store data online. It might still possible to lose the online
document (the reason might be email sending problem, data format error or
server’s crash…), but the odds are lower than with paper documents. People
can edit the document many times without making the document a mess, and
moreover, editing can be done together to schedule the group calendar. Every
member in the group can share the current schedule and work process.
Since online PIM systems can compute from remote servers or terminal
computers, the to-do list can be more than a clip of small paper when it stored
online, but can also be reformatted. Furthermore, PIM also allows users to back
up data and reformat for presentability
The first, and also the main, motivation for using online PIM tools is that
online PIM extends the “reachability.” People can send their documents
anywhere, and online PIM means they don’t need to bring anything. Although
online PIM still can’t replace the paper, it supplements the gap of traditional
personal information management. The second motivation is the increase of
digital resources. People output the data to paper documents due to the
readability, but now there’s a common sense that the digital storage make
documents easier to modify and retrieve. PIM system is also more
environmentally friendly, for instance banks encourage their costumers to
manage their accounts online and apply for paperless billing.
The advantages to using online PIM systems are easily apparent to users.
Online PIM can be transferred very quickly. It might be difficult to evaluate PIM
systems because of the issue of privacy, but sometimes the successes of online
interfaces are not only due to the design, but also users’ habits. When users get
used one information management tool, especially the online PIM application
usually tied with the team work project, it will be very hard to ask them change
the system. As this article mentioned before, people don’t like to spend time on
inputting data, neither transferring. Because of users’ habits and information
sharing behaviors discussed above, the number of online PIM users and the first
impression of the interfaces (for example: the interfaces and visual design and
the simplicity for using) will decide whether the online PIM successful or not.
Conclusion
The history of Personal Information Management can’t be traced back to a
single year of development. People started to using brains, papers etc. to
manage their information for a long time. It’s a new area in the knowledge
management field, but it has strong ties to traditional information management
practices. PIM research makes internal knowledge connect with the knowledge
management systems within organizations, and furthermore, makes personal
information become personal knowledge.
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