Personal Information Management

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Personal Information Management

• Whats on your PIM?
• Readings review

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Whats on your PIM?

• Contact info
• Phone
• Fax
• Email
• Address(es)
• To Do
• Meetings
• Lists
• Reminders
• Email
• Documents
• Music
• Video
• Text
• Other formats

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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?

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Life beyond the mailbox

• Email isnt the only way to organize your
  schedule or information
• What if it were the only way?
• One interface isnt 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

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Reference tasks with multiple tools

• How to organize information
• Folders
• Time
• Person
• Project
• User-defined
• Reminders
• Notification
• Completion
• Tracking
• Towards an Activity Space

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Users constrained by PIMs

• One application for everything
• Too much or too little compartmentalization
• How do users organize docs, email, bookmarks?
• 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

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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

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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?

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Lifestreams Ideas

• 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

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Lifestreams model

• 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)

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Scopeware
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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)

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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

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Info Archiving with Bookmarks (3)

• Methods for Organizing Bookmarks
• None
• Ordered List (re-arranged)
• Sets Folders
• Hierarchy (Nested Folders)
• External Web Page(s)
• Other System(s)
• More Bookmarks Require More Organization Methods

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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

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Info Archiving with Bookmarks (5)

• Organizing Bookmarks
• Only When Necessary
• Tradeoff Against Not Finding a Bookmark
• Finding Bookmarks
• Names of Bookmarks Not Always Descriptive
• Folders Difficult to Navigate
• Remembering Bookmark Location Challenging
• Recalling Exact Bookmark Name Unlikely

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Info Archiving with Bookmarks (6)

• How to Enable Expand Bookmarking Functions?
• Taxonomy-Classification
• Automatic Bookmarking
• Agents
• 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 Dont Scale for Volume
• Implications for IA?

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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

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Find and Remind

• Classification
• Automatic
• Format forced
• Multiple
• Deferred
• Notification
• Frequency of task
• Priority of task
• Size and importance
• Color, format, labels for differences and notice

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Keeping found things found

• 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?

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How they did it
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Agenda the history of PIMs

• First and foremost?
• Good, bad and definitely ugly
• Foundation for Notes
• What about Magellan?
• Free form too free?

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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