Informing the Design of an Information Management System with Iterative Fieldwork Victoria Bellotti and Ian Smith Xerox PARC, 3333 Coyote Hill Rd. Palo Alto, CA 94304 +1-650-812-4666
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We entered the domain of PIM hoping to address the first challenge by accommodating the use of paper. We focused on contact managers, schedules, to-dos and notes and began designing a system, ‘Raton Laveur1’ to deliver these resources both online and in paper form. However, our fieldwork persuaded us that the limitations of current online tools may have more to do with forcing users to compartmentalize information in different organizational structures within different non-integrated applications where it is inconvenient to get at, rather than simply forcing them to manage their personal information online.
ABSTRACT
We report on the design process of a personal information management system, Raton Laveur, and how it was influenced by an intimate relationship between iterative fieldwork and design thinking. Initially, the system was conceived as a paper-based UI to calendar, contacts, to-dos and notes. As the fieldwork progressed, our understanding of people’s practices and the constraints of their office infrastructures radically shifted our design goals away from paper-based interaction to embedded interaction with our system. By this we mean embedding information management functionality in an existing application such as email.
In this paper we describe how iterative fieldwork and design, in conjunction, enabled us to see beyond what we wanted to build, to what would be beneficial as a solution to some of the problems with current PIM technology.
Keywords
Field study, interview, information management.
design,
iteration,
personal
Evolving PIM System Design Conceptions
INTRODUCTION
Before we describe our field methods and findings it is necessary to clarify the nature of the system, Raton Laveur, that we planned to prototype. Our ideas about the system we were designing evolved radically through three distinct conceptions as the fieldwork was conducted.
Personal information management (PIM) is the practice of managing information that helps us in our daily lives such as addresses, phone numbers, to-dos, appointments, notes, documents, folders [8], and also, these days, urls and email addresses. Computing technology has provided us with many resources to help manage the burgeoning complexity of modern living such as online calendar, contact and to-do list applications and bookmarks and file hierarchies for organizing documents. However, despite the availability of impressive new technology, humble paper tools such as day-timers, notepads and folders are still used by most people. There is ample literature suggesting that this is due to poor support for managing documents and personal information online [7, 8, 10, 13]. So for PIM technology to increase its appeal, we believe it must address one or both of two challenges: it must accommodate the paper that works so well for many, or overcome problems of poor support for PIM online.
Our initial, innovative conception was a paper-based PDA, (similar to [6]) that would involve scanning, printing and document recognition technology. It would provide paper forms for calendar, contact and to-do information that users could edit online and then print out, carry around in a day-timer and annotate before scanning back in to update their online information. Even before we were half way through our field interviews, we learned that this first idea was too complex and not likely to be appealing to users. Our second conception was a much simpler version of the first envisionment; a paper meeting-notes management system that used special form-like note-paper for handwritten notes (figure 1 shows an early prototype of the form). Certain aspects of the form (namely the options for
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1. We chose to name our prototype after a raccoon, an animal that is known to collect bright, shiny objects, as we hoped our system would collect bits of useful information. Raton Laveur is Canadian French for raccoon, literally, “little washing rat.” Both of the authors were practising French at the time of this project, however, we are still not very good at it.
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The rest of the paper explains how we moved so far from our initial, blue-skies, technology-driven perspective on solutions for PIM towards a much more pragmatic perspective, based on a deeper understanding of the practicalities of our prospective users’ practices and foreseeable future infrastructures in most office settings.
Users check boxes to describe content and select functionality
A DESIGN-ORIENTED STUDY OF PIM The Field Methods
Before and in-parallel with our design efforts, we conducted 36 interviews in a three-phased study: Our primary aims in conducting these interviews were:
Hand written notes would go here
• •
To develop a good understanding of PIM. To obtain feedback about our design ideas by explaining the system we envisaged and asking specific questions about that system. The three phases of our interview study were as follows: 1. Four pilot, in-house, in-situ, two-way show-and-tell interviews (both interviewees and interviewers demonstrate their ideas and explanations) with photographs, video and detailed transcription as data, to develop field questions of interest and to gain preliminary feedback about our initial system design ideas (1 hour). 2. Eight in-depth, in-situ, two-way show-and-tell interviews using photography, video, and detailed transcription as data to explore our developing areas of interest and to get feedback on a more clearly defined system description (60-90 minutes). 3. 24 in-breadth interviews to bolster our confidence and verify specific observations (40-60 minutes). The in-situ interviews were all conducted in the usual workplace of the interviewee, where it was possible for them to show us examples of their PIM solutions and demonstrate their practices. The in-breadth interviews were conducted mainly in our own offices or over the telephone (five of the interviewees were based outside the USA).
Figure 1. Prototype of paper-based UI to notes organization system. The prototype was deliberately hand-drawn to elicit criticism from interviewees that could be less forthcoming with a finely-rendered version. the checkboxes) could be customized online by users and then translated into a printable format by a Xerox scanning architecture, DAE, which inserted something called a glyph (a scanning-system-readable mark encoding a unique identifier for a page) on the bottom-right corner of the printout. This could be recognized at scan time, allowing DAE to identify and parse the contents of the form appropriately and perform pre-defined actions on those contents. Through the ticking of checkboxes (see figure 1) DAE allowed users to define the contents of the form as actions, ordinary notes or contacts. By ticking further checkboxes, they could then email them, or add them to a to-do list or a calendar, or simply save them in a document repository, DocuShare™, which is widely used at Xerox. Recipients of the contents could also be specified by checkboxes. This version of Raton Laveur was partially implemented before we realized that it was unlikely to be accepted by users.
In the two-way show-and-tell method we used, we obtained background information, asked questions about PIM and requested concrete descriptions and demonstrations (e.g., show us how you last did this) before we explained and demonstrated our own design ideas. This ordering was deliberate so as not to prejudice interviewees’ answers. The interviewees in each of the phases were all personal computer users and thus people who might find our system useful. We searched for people with a wide range of careers and backgrounds to represent as diverse a selection as possible of potential users of our system.
In a third incarnation of Raton Laveur, based on our interview findings, we retreated from paper altogether as we discovered how scanners are only rarely used in small and even large organizations and how PIM actually takes place. Instead, we focused on embedding PIM functionality within existing applications and implemented a prototype email system with support for to-dos, document and notes organization. This version of the system will be described in more detail in the final sections of this paper.
In phase 1, the pilot study, we interviewed four employees at our research facility: A systems administrator, a materials handler, a researcher and an administrative assistant. In phase 2, we interviewed 8 people: an entrepreneur running a mailing-list and web-based community, the owner of a system and UI design consulting firm, a systems
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pursued in further questioning and analysis, exploiting methods from the contextual design approach [2].
engineer, a marketing specialist, an education researcher, a VP of financial product development, a biotech scientist, and a manager in the US Department of Justice.
In the following sections we outline the findings from each of the three phases of our fieldwork and show how they influenced and changed our design direction.
In phase 3, we interviewed 24 people, with too many job titles to list here, but including: engineering, design, creative (audio, TV presenting, art), research, management, administration, health-and-fitness, and student.
Pilot Interviews
The questions in the four pilot interviews in phase 1 were very much focused around the tasks of scheduling, contact management, to-dos and list making. They concentrated on the following areas:
The rationale for having three phases of interviews was: •
To iteratively develop a pertinent and comprehensive set of questions around our area of interest. • To evolve our focus and questions away from pre-existing assumptions towards evidence-based understandings, and especially towards unforeseen problem areas that could be addressed by our envisaged design. • To develop hypotheses about PIM, based on qualitative analysis from non-leading questions with in-depth answers in the first two phases. Then to test those hypotheses by asking more specific questions of a wider range of interviewees to acquire some more quantitative data in the final phase. • Aside from developing our questions with preliminary interviews, beginning in-house also allowed us to iron out technical bugs in our data collection procedures such as a faulty camera. After the pilot interviews, we also realized that we needed to bring paper prototypes of our initial system that interviewees could evaluate. Given our tight deadlines, we felt that observational studies of PIM practices were a luxury that we could not afford with such a small team of two researchers. However, we took pains to gather and analyze as much data as possible from our interviews.
• • • •
How much time is spent doing these tasks? What are the current solutions and artifacts involved? Demonstrations of each of these tasks How satisfactory is the current solution compared to past or other possible solutions? • Feedback on our idea for a paper-based, electronic scheduling/contacts/to-do/list-making system. Upon completing these interviews, we watched and discussed the video-tapes taking detailed notes and semitranscriptions from each one. The notes for each interviewee were then combined into a single collated document containing observations, design ideas and further questions based on each interview. We then conducted an affinity clustering exercise (grouping each snippet of transcript or notes with topically related snippets), based upon the contextual enquiry approach described in [2]. This exercise left us with a clustering of concepts that departed from some of our initial ideas about PIM. These were. Practices: The timing and nature of PIM activity is often concentrated in the morning, also around events and meetings and also in periodic efforts at organizing which might include filing, printing or scanning (we later found this scanning, mentioned by the two knowledge workers amongst our interviewees, was not typical outside Xerox). Reminders: To-dos, visible schedules and other artifacts draw attention to action at appropriate times. Tangibility, appearance and location of artifacts is key to their effectiveness as reminders. Collections: Working document collections [15] are typically gathered together for activities or events. These include documents, notes and email. Sharing: Our interviewees all mentioned dealing with trade-offs between personal versus shared needs for information and documents. Two clusters of issues in particular attracted our attention, as tractable to design. These were reminders and collections:
Analysis A key feature of our approach to the fieldwork and design involved in Raton Laveur was that both members of this collaboration (the authors of this paper), a usability specialist and an engineer, conducted the interviews and developed design requirements from the findings together. By not having one collaborator focus on requirements and the other on engineering, our common, but individual understandings of the data led to a richer and more reliable set of interpretations of our field data. Further, with both of us having ‘been there,’ the usability specialist was not the sole source of intuitions about what kinds of design solutions would work. This approach paid off later on as the engineer in the team was able to make many insightful leaps forward in both the functionality and the UI of the prototype design, based on his own target-user-derived experience. Although our iterative methods with increasingly refined questioning, driven by developing understanding of the domain, draw from the philosophy of grounded theory [14], we were too few and under too tight a schedule to justify microanalysis of our data (even so, we spent 6 months gathering and analyzing our data). We did, however, code this qualitative data to develop concepts of interest to be
Reminders We saw many reminders in the form of a note, pile or item placed in a particular location, (but no computer generated reminders). The utility of reminders was repeatedly brought up by our pilot interviewees. This phenomenon has also
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management of such collections is somewhat troublesome as has been noted in the literature [1, 7, 8, 10, 16].
Email print-out clipped to relevant date in calendar
We learned that a key focus of PIM is events or meetings that must be planned and scheduled and that also involve repeated reference to and exchange of email, documents or document collections. In fact it became clear that, if we wanted to support PIM, we should consider supporting email, document and notes management around meetings. In particular, we found that, for the two knowledge workers in our pilot interviews, there was less interest in a paperbased PDA, for scheduling, contact management and todos, than in help in managing collections of hand-written notes, email and documents around events and meetings. P1–Technical Infrastructure Manager “Here’s something you could really help me with. Give me some forms that I can take notes on [in meetings] and mark and pop in the scanner and have them go where they need to go in my filing system. That would help.” P2–Researcher “...right now I print out my emails to take to meetings and it would be great if I could attach that online, and then the system would scurry off and print out all the relevant documents.”
Figure 2. Embedding the event information in an email print-out within a calendar representation. been discussed in [2] in regard to items on PC desktops and [10] in relation to physical offices. Our pilot interviews showed us that both online and tangible artifacts are only good reminders when they are ‘in-the-way’ in the appropriate context. Also, it seemed that it was far easier to create useful reminders using paper and physical artifacts rather than online tools. This was not strictly to do with a preference for paper per se.
After the pilot interviews, and during the subsequent indepth interviews, our design conception began to evolve into a simpler, paper meeting-notes management system. that would accommodate the two knowledge workers’ desires. Our reasons for abandoning the idea of a paperbased PDA with forms for calendar, contact and to-do information only emerged during those subsequent interviews.
Our interviewees placed colored sticky notes, collections of documents or email print-outs where they expected to be focusing their attention when they needed to be reminded about things. For example, figure 2 shows how pilot interviewee P4 (Materials Handler) clips email print-outs describing events on a wall calendar. Here, the message containing information necessary for planning an event is embedded in a representation that supports event planning. Neither email nor calendar applications support this kind of embedding at present (though some support other kinds of reminders), so people must use physical artifacts to create this kind of hybrid representation. We see this example not as an argument for physical or paper-based representations, but more as a reflection of a need for embedding better PIM capabilities in common workspaces, which would include online applications such as email and word-processors.
In-depth Interviews
Our eight in-depth interviews were designed and conducted to leverage what we had learned in our pilot interviews and to solicit feedback on our evolving design ideas. The main foci of our questions were now as follows: • •
•
•
Documents, Collections and Events People typically accumulate piles of documents, notes and collections of email that are in some way related, either temporarily (the term working document collections has been coined by Trigg et al. [15] to refer to temporary, activity related collections) or over the longer-term. The
• •
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What kind of work do people do on paper or offline and what online? Why do they choose the media they use? How do people organize their schedule, to-do- and other lists, and how do they manage the documents associated with activities they plan? We asked for concrete examples and estimated frequencies of these practices. What kinds of things do people take to and bring back from meetings or other events and what do they do with these things in terms of PIM? Do people regularly do things that help organization around meetings and events (e.g., email exchanges, document exchanges, execute action items, save notes, distribute notes, set reminders, notify others of results)? What are the pros and cons of the various form factors of artifacts and the PIM solutions that involve them? How far away are the nearest printer and scanner? Are there lots of them around?
•
We showed interviewees two prototypes of our paperPDA and paper meeting-notes management system ideas (including the one shown in figure 1) and solicited feedback about our ideas of how the system might work. Our data consisted of video tapes, which were fully transcribed, along with digital and analogue photographs. We conducted a further and more detailed affinity clustering exercise by breaking down the contents of the transcripts from all of these interviews into topic-related chunks. We were able to collate the results into a large (46000 words) document, which was organized not by the questions we asked, but by 39 clustered discussion topics. These clusters were further grouped into the following super-clusters:
Figure 3. Business cards as reminders to contact people and to represent active projects.
Guilt: This was a lighthearted category that reflected the fact that everyone seemed to think that they ought to be more organized than they were. Documents and Notes: Paper versus Online: We saw a tension between the ideal of working online, and the appreciation of the advantages of paper. Most documents are acquired online as email or attachments. Short ones are often read online as they are delivered that way, but longer ones are usually printed out. Notes range from the tiny sticky variety to extensive pages and are almost always made on paper (laptops are too intrusive for note-taking and PDAs are too slow). Typically, extensive notes are left in notepads or with collections from meetings: only two interviewees filed their notes and one said notes can be hard to resolve with existing filing schemes. Collateral: This was a term we used to refer to the many, collections of documents that our interviewees maintained and carried around with them. People make collections of notes, email and documents for various activities and, in particular, for taking to and after collecting them in meetings. Organizing them after meetings seemed to be an onerous task for several of the interviewees. Reminders: These can be explicit; scribbled on sticky notes (all 8 interviewees used these), scraps of paper or cards, or implicit; constituting piles of documents or objects placed in a particular location (in-sight or in-the-way of some anticipated action such as leaving the office). Some interviewees also mentioned leaving items in their email in-box as reminders [cf 1, 16]. Calendar and Scheduling: There were myriad different solutions for scheduling amongst our interviewees. Several had more than one. Those with paper daytimers (4) did not keep a back-up. Three interviewees used online group calendaring solutions, but relied heavily on printed out copies to carry around. Several interviewees complained about the complexity of online calendars. Two had Pilots but found they only used restricted functions, due, in part, to the awkwardness of inputting data. Contacts: Our interviewees kept contacts mainly on business cards (saved email and organizational contact lists were also common). Important contacts may be
copied into daytimers and 4 used online contact managers. However, it is too much effort to copy them all online, so most had disorganized collections of business cards or hunted through email messages for contacts. Interestingly, we noticed that 3 interviewees placed cards next to the phone or PC as reminders to contact people (See figure 3). In these cases, the reminders were clearly embedded in the appropriate workspace to which they applied. Activities: Our interviewees claimed that they spend about 10% of their time managing information. This includes organizing (sorting, filing and copying information from one place to another), searching, sifting through piles (looking for things that need doing), culling (finding things to discard), making lists and plans. We found that collections of documents are usually organized by project, but events and organizations/people (e.g., clients or collaborators) are also important organizing principles. Meetings: As with the pilot interviews, we found that meetings are a nexus of information management activity. Meetings are usually organized using email and calendars (group calendars are ideal for this purpose). There is also heavy use of email to transfer meeting-related messages and documents before and after the event. Tools: We identified myriad tools, from scraps of paper to large-scale source-code management systems, as relevant to supporting information management. We learned that, even for standard PIM-style activities such as scheduling, contacts and to-do management, there is no standardization in technology, in contrast to the nearubiquitous use of MS-Office for productivity applications. Feedback on the paper prototypes: The feedback we received from our paper prototypes was luke-warm at best. In particular, our paper calendar form proved to be quite unacceptable. There seemed to be a number of problems with it that we realized were likely to lead to insurmountable design challenges. The first was that different people had different preferences for paper size (just as different people have different sized daytimers). The second was that everyone was giving us different feedback on their preferred lay-out for both forms, but especially the calendar. The diversity of paper daytimers
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converting them to ASCII text (due to the requirement of existing handwriting recognition technology for stroke information in handwriting that can only be captured at the time of writing). These unfavorable revelations compounded the luke-warm reception for our paperprototypes and for the whole scanning idea as we presented it to interviewees at the end of each interview. Without handwriting recognition, the perceived benefits of a paperbased PIM system would only be marginal and the trade-off, in terms of the laborious and repeated printing and scanning processes required to make it work, would be too great. As one interviewee put it:
on the market and different views used in online calendars, which we had already studied, should have alerted us to both of these possible problems. Thirdly, our interviewees were clearly not enthralled with the idea of using a system based on paper. We could tell they were simply trying to be polite about our design idea (this politeness is not an uncommon phenomenon when soliciting design feedback and is something one must be prepared for when conducting this kind of study). Gradually, we retreated from the idea of a paper-based PDA altogether, since it would require an additional interface for users to customize their own lay-out and would result in a much more complicated system to parse the content in diverse lay-outs.
“I’m beginning to feel sorry for you, I don’t want to print things out. If this turns into a product, there’s a window of applicability of 5-10 years.”
These findings overall suggest that there are certainly opportunities for new applications in the domain of PIM, with so little standardization and so many interesting problems. However, contrary to the received wisdom inside Xerox, we began to realize that the whole idea of paper UIs to computer systems may not necessarily be attractive to users.
From Paper back to Online
We were extremely disappointed by our in-depth interview findings. We now had to return to the drawing-board if we wanted to come up with something useful to support PIM. We re-examined our data to look for new ideas for an interesting application. Three findings stood out:
For a while during these interviews, we hung onto the simpler idea of a paper meeting-notes management system, since it did not require different paper form factors and the form itself was much simpler and would not require so much end-user customization (see figure 1). But as the interviews progressed we, as Xerox employees, who were used to having plenty of new, ‘high-tech’ scanners and printers around our lab, were surprised by the extreme scarcity of high-speed, sophisticated scanners outside of our organization that would make scanning-in notes on a regular basis tolerable.
•
At last, we realized that, if people are unwilling to even file their paper notes because it is too problematic and time consuming, adding a scanning-step to the process of notes management would not make much sense. Another depressing realization was that our interviewees were also surprised and disappointed that we were not planning to increase the searchability of handwritten notes by
Email seemed to be the main document transfer vehicle for our interviewees. • Email is the main online conduit for coordination and collaboration and as such contains a good deal of information about the documents that it is used to convey. • While many of our interviewees used paper to support a great deal of PIM, we also saw many examples of activity that underlined the need for embedded information management capabilities online in productivity tools and, in particular, in email. For example, several interviewees talked about how email was used to generate todo items based on communications with colleagues and some mentioned leaving email in their in-box as to-do items. We also saw word processors used as to-do list support tools. It was clear that 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. Email seemed to be the application that is most likely to be open at any time. We began to believe more seriously that the apparent preference for paper for a lot of PIM functionality might well be more than to do with the fact that paper is a high resolution, intuitive, lightweight, cheap and flexible medium. Paper is, of course, also an ever-present resource in the workplace and is easy to get at when needed for jotting a reminder and it is easy to leave lying around, stick on a wall for permanent visibility, or to carry anywhere, allowing instant access to useful information. In short, paper is ever-present and handy within the working environment
2. This suspicion was heightened by the fact that, in our 24 subsequent interviews, we heard of only one other instance of a high-volume scanner and this was being used for exactly the same application; scanning in resumés for electronic distribution around a large organization.
It occurred to us that email might have similar properties to paper in that it is an ever-present and handy resource in the online workspace. Further, although email messages are not always visible like paper scattered around the walls and
Only the manager in the department of justice had access to a high-speed scanner, and this machine was not set up for personal use, it was intended to be used for a specific solution; scanning in resumés for electronic distribution around a very large organization. It could be many years before the kinds of scanners required to support a paper notes management system would be widespread, and it was unclear that they would be purchased for anything other than high-volume applications such as the one we observed2.
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estimated that they read on average 42 messages a day. Fifteen agreed that email is the main way they transmit documents (and 4 said it was a major way). Nine interviewees also said that they use their email as an archive for attached documents.
desktop, email content is frequently, as a matter of daily practice, sifted and inspected. It is also easily searchable-bycontent One of our interviewees even reported using her email tool as a document archive just because she could search by content or sender to find documents that would not be searchable by content or sender in her normal file hierarchy:
Almost all of the respondents said that they read their email either constantly (about 15 respondents) or frequently throughout the day (three times a day seemed to be the minimum estimate). Exactly half agreed that the content of incoming email tended to structure their day’s work (another 6 said sometimes this happens). Twelve also agreed that they use their in-box as a to-do list (another 4 said maybe they do this).
“because the way I can most remember is who they came from or... it just makes it easier to search.” In-breadth Interview Study
The notable findings from our in-depth interviews reported above were intriguing, but we felt that perhaps our qualitative data did not strongly support them, particularly as the in-depth interviews did not focus specifically on the phenomena in question. We decided to conduct a final round of interviews to confirm or dispel our various hypotheses about PIM and, in particular, the notion that email could be an important locus for PIM support requirements.
These findings suggest that email may well be the most important and frequently used computer application for most people. It is usually running all day long, even if it isn’t the center of attention. For the great majority, it is constantly monitored and is the conduit for most incoming and outgoing content. Mackay [9] also notes that email is often used as a time- and task-management tool as well as a message delivery and reading system.
We conducted 24 shorter and more focused interviews on the following issues: •
Meetings: If meetings are an important nexus of PIM how frequent are they and how are they scheduled? • Email: How much email and how many attachments are sent and received and what do people do with the content? How often do people use their email tool? • Phone-calls: How does phone-use compare with email? • Notes: What do people take notes on (e.g., ideas, phonecalls, etc.) and what do people do with their notes? • Schedule/contact/to-do (the standard PIM applications): How are these maintained? • Use of PC platforms, PDAs, printers and scanners and proximity of the last two to one’s desk. The results of these interviews were collated for the purpose of gathering some rough statistics. In a few cases it was possible to combine these numbers with findings from the previous interviews. As a result we had samples of either 24 or 36 answers to various questions.
Given these findings, it should be no surprise that our inbreadth interviews would suggest that email seems to be the center of a great deal PIM.
Phone-calls We collected data on phone-calls purely for comparison with email as a medium for supporting communication and collaboration. The 24 in-breadth interviewees reported making 10 and receiving 10 calls a day on average (5 of the incoming calls ended up as voicemail). Thus, for PC users, it is probably safe to say that email has become a more common communication tool than the telephone, although we found that the telephone is typically used for different reasons, such as handling sensitive issues where email is well-known (at least amongst our interviewees) to be a poor medium. Notes Our 24 in-breadth interviewees estimated keeping an average of 2 notebooks and the majority (20) save their notes. While 18 refer back to their notes (mainly actions or recent notes), only a third of them said they file their notes separately from their notebooks (another 2 do so rarely).
The results, based on all of the data available from the inbreadth and, where possible, all three sets of interviews combined are summarized in the following sections.
Meetings Based on the estimates from the 24 in-breadth interviewees we found that people average about 10 meetings per week, of which 5 are scheduled. This high number would explain why so much of PIM centers around meetings, since our indepth interviews showed that meetings require access to, generation of and receipt of documents that either support their organization or pertain to the topic of the meeting.
The finding that only one in three regularly file their notes suggested to us that most people would be unwilling to go to the additional trouble of scanning-in and filing notes online, particularly without the incentive of the benefits of converting handwriting into computer-searchable ASCII.
PIM and Lack of Standardization in Online Tools While about 80% of our 36 interviewees have standardized on Microsoft Office products for productivity applications (some also use other platforms for software development or other work), PIM tools show no sign of standardization.
Email From the 24 in-breadth interviews we got estimates of respondents receiving an average of 67 messages per day with 9 attachments and sending 24 with 4 attachments. They
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Each person used various available resources and created their own unique configuration of PIM software, hardware and paper-based artifacts with frequent switching or customization of solutions in the search for something more effective. For example, below we list the various scheduling solutions we observed or heard about (note that all current PDA users–7 out of 36–were Pilot users): MS Outlook MS SchedulePlus In-house-online Now Up To Date MeetingMaker Sun CalendarMgr Yahoo
Netscape Pilot Pilot client Filofax (UK) Franklin (US) Day-timer (week) Day-timer (day)
•
Pocket-book Wall calendar Gant chart Whiteboard Sticky-notes Mental notes
•
•
The story is much the same for contacts and to-do items, though perhaps to a lesser degree. Even solutions for storing documents are varied. In fact most people duplicate their organizational schemes across several of the following filing solutions below (note: we see piles on the desk as being distinct from piles on the floor as they seem to have a different status from each other): Files on PC desktop Electronic file hierarchy Ftp server Web server As attachments to email Saved web searches
Raton Laveur: A Prototype Embedded PIM System
Based on our four design imperatives, we began prototyping an embedded PIM system, the third incarnation of Raton Laveur. The primary function of the system was to manage email and any other incoming documents and conduct the kinds of time- and task-management suggested by our fieldwork and that of [9].
Filing cabinets Trays on desktop Vertical holders on desktop Pigeon-holes Piles on the desk Piles on the floor
Figure 4 shows the main view of Raton Laveur. It is designed to look like an ordinary email system’s list-andcontent viewer, with the usual functionality. The window is divided into two main views. The top one is the list viewer and the bottom is the content viewer. Each item appears in the list viewer with sender, subject and date information visible. Icons show whether an attachment is included.
Printers and Scanners While most people have access to a printer within 20 feet of their desk (averaging about 11 print-outs per day), scanners usually are either absent or a long way away. Only two of the 29 interviewees who worked outside of Xerox had access to a high-speed scanner within their building. In both cases these were used for scanning in resumes for electronic distribution within the organization.
However, Raton Laveur is not really like an ordinary email system, as it doesn’t have the concept of an in-box in the usual sense. Instead, it has a more general-purpose mechanism that incorporates the ability to simulate the behavior of an in-box. The user applies ‘filtered views’ (searches) to a large corpus of documents in a document repository to determine what and how much they see and the order in which they see it. This is specified in the search definition area at the top of the window.
FIELDWORK-DRIVEN DESIGN OF AN EMBEDDED PIM SYSTEM Design Principles
The search definition area contains a ‘Search Terms’ input field that accepts standard query terms. Menus allow the user to search either headers only or the entire textual contents of documents and to specify their age: up to week, a month, or a year old, or all documents. The ‘Saved Queries’ menu is a list of saved searches. The system provides a pre-set default ‘Unseen’ search, for new documents and a ‘To-do’ search for to-do and completed items. Users can save additional search filters by clicking on the ‘Save’ button at the top of the list viewer to save the current search definition as a query that can be applied repeatedly to documents in the repository.
Armed with the qualitative and quantitative findings from the three batches of interviews that we conducted, we became reasonably confident that our design instincts were now much more closely aligned with our intended users’ practices, infrastructures and requirements. We now had reasonable evidence for four design principles that drove the final prototype of Raton Laveur, which we were now thinking of as an embedded PIM support tool: •
the user should be able to draw together and use the information without leaving that space. This imperative is based on our observation that people prefer to use an easy-to-access open application such as email to handle PIM. Flexibility: Users must be able to customize the way they leverage the system’s power. This requirement is based on the great variety and adaptation of PIM solutions that we saw amongst our interviewees. Lightweight: PIM-style information (e.g., projectname, to-do, due-date) should be as easy to attach to any element as it is to place a sticky note on anything. Simplicity: People dislike complex PIM tools. A successful solution must be easy to learn. This is based on our observation and that of [3] that people dislike investing time and effort mastering more than a minimum number of tools and features (MS Outlook was repeatedly described as too heavyweight).
Embedding PIM in an Application the Supports Ongoing Work: People dislike switching to a different application purely for the purpose of information management. PIM functionality should be a part of the experience of the active online workspace. In other words,
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oriented) computer application: reading and managing email. It is also a documentrepository viewer. Thus, it is an application that is likely to be open continuously and is therefore a good place to embed PIM capabilities. Aside from behaving like a standard email browser (including the ability to mimic foldering behavior), Raton Laveur supports three special embedded PIM capabilities which were strongly motivated by our field data. These are notes (of the sticky variety), grouped collections and reminders, which reflect some of the most popular paper resources seen in our interviewees offices:
Figure 4. Raton Laveur as embedded PIM functionality within an email-style document viewer. Documents including email and scans are viewed together. A filtered search for documents with ‘Victoria’ and ‘design’ in the header is shown and the last scan, entitled,‘Design Meeting,’ is selected and displayed. We have added a key with a drop-shadow for the meanings of the indicators used in the email list viewer
Notes: Our interviews showed that the use of sticky notes and cover-notes in the physical office is pervasive. In Raton Laveur we mimic their function using ‘slicky notes.’ These are created by selecting any file in the list viewer and clicking on the ‘Note’ button below the content viewer (see figure 4–in the top right area of the lower pane). The user then types directly into the note that appears. When they close the note, it attaches itself to the document (the note can be re-edited when it is opened again). Mousing over a slicky note in the list viewer pops up its text, to show what has been written without having to open the document. There is a note icon in the content viewer, which, when selected, disappears to be replaced by a note window in the bottom right corner, which remains there as the user scrolls the document (see figure 4). So we call them ‘slicky’ notes because they don’t quite stick!
The benefits of slicky notes are as follows:
All Raton Laveur documents reside in an information soup, which is handled by a middleware document repository management system [5]. Documents can be universally searched, regardless of type, according to a user query specifying required content or document properties (or both). There is no application-centric restriction on what is displayed in the list viewer: any incoming file can be included. So, in this prototype, other documents appear amongst the emails and can be inspected, as shown in figure 4, where a scanned document is being viewed.
•
They may be used rather like covering notes and can quickly be checked before deciding whether to inspect or ignore the contents of the document. • As we and others [1, 16] have observed, some users leave messages in their in-box for so long that it is hard to find things in the jumble. Slickies are a resource for making important documents stand out. • They act as reminders of what to do with documents that one doesn’t have time to deal right away. • They can be used to jot down interesting thoughts about or reactions to content. • Slicky notes attached to groups of documents (see below) may be used to record the rationale for the grouping, which may eventually be forgotten as the context of the documents’ use fades from memory. Groups: Grouped documents are very distinct from folders, which are usually out of sight in a GUI application. Groups are a resource like the piles of working document collections seen on people’s desks [7, 9, 11, 15]. They have a
The engineer in our collaboration has been using this prototype to read and manage his own email for six months. Principles in Practice
How does the Raton Laveur prototype match up to our interview-based design principles?
Embedding PIM in an Application the Supports Ongoing Work Raton Laveur supports what our fieldwork suggested is the most important work-oriented (i.e., not purely PIM-
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viewed in the list-viewer, the content of the document to which a to-do item refers is easily accessible (as is the content in the email message in figure 2) by a one-click operation of selecting the item to view its contents in the content viewer (like the scanned document in figure 4).
representative member (think of it as the top document on a pile) allocated by the user, which will always be displayed when any group member matches search constraints. The other members of the group can be accessed through that representative, rather like rooting through a pile of documents.
Any to-do item, when opened, reveals a UI for setting an explicit reminder. This allows the user to set a deadline and reminder some time before. The reminder acts by marking the to-do item as an ‘Alert’ document, which will be displayed with unseen documents after the specified time.
To group documents, the user simply selects them from the list viewer and hits the ‘Group’ icon at the bottom of the list viewer (see figure 4). In the current implementation, the earliest dated document in the group becomes the ‘representative’, which is the only document of the group that is displayed in the list viewer. The rest of the group can be accessed by selecting the representative, whereupon a new window opens and displays all of the members.
Flexibility, Lightweight-ness and Simplicity Raton Laveur was designed to be as flexible as possible while maintaining lightweightness and simplicity. Users have three ways of creating collections: groups, save-able dynamic queries and folders, which do not conflict with one another. Informal experience using these three mechanisms together suggests that content is extremely easy to manage and retrieve (even after months of adding content).
The benefits of groups are: •
They reduce clutter in the list viewer without imposing the many drawbacks of filing [4, 7, 8, 10, 12]. For example, many people have thousands of messages in their inboxes [16] and deliberately avoid filing things, as they risk forgetting about or losing them once they disappear. Grouping relieves this problem, as a representative of the collection that matches the subject that has been searched for appears as a reminder. • Grouping extends the system’s reach beyond features available for automatic processing. For example, if one has a thread of email discussion and some related documents and scans one wants to keep together, some of the critical content will not explicitly match a subjectrelated search. For example, a message with a body containing only the words, “I think your first suggestion is the right solution, let’s proceed!” or a scanned document that cannot be textually indexed can now be retrieved in a search for the subject matter by user-specified membership of a group that matches a search query. In Raton Laveur, we still permit users to create folders as they usually do with an email system. However, folders in no way affect the results of normal searches or the behavior of groups. Searches retrieve documents or groups, regardless of whether they reside in folders or not.
The grouping, foldering, note and to-do functions are all executed in the same manner: by selecting items within the list-viewer and clicking on a button. There are no arcane procedures to learn with this system. We adopted a policy of adding no additional features unless experience-in-use dictated that the system was frustrating without them. As mentioned, the engineer in our team has used this system as his email tool for many months and prefers not to return to his previous application, even with the limited functionality that Raton Laveur presently has. DESIGN REFLECTIONS
What made this project interesting for both authors was that throughout the design of Raton Laveur, interview findings were being continuously channelled into our design thinking as both members of the team were very much involved in the interview and analysis process as well as driving the design itself. Furthermore, the fieldwork preceded the engineering and continued while the engineering was in progress. This meant that there was a two-way interaction between the design of the system prototype and the nature of the fieldwork (in terms of the questions we were asking in our interviews).
Reminders: Since so many email users already co-opt their email tool as a to-do list manager, we have provided two explicit support features for to-do reminders.
Our incoming data gradually convinced us that our initial paper-PDA idea would result in a more complicated system than we anticipated, since we would have to design for enduser customizable paper forms. The system was already complex enough, involving interfacing between the DAE form-scanning technology and the Docushare document management software. As a result of the involvement of the engineer in the interviews, he was quickly convinced, in the face of a much harder engineering task, that the system should be simplified.
Any item in the list viewer can be made a to-do item by selecting it and then clicking the to-do button at the bottom of the list viewer. A to-do icon appears to the right of the item in the list viewer. To-do then becomes a property of the item and a special pre-defined search query can be used to filter all documents in the repository for the to-do property. The benefits of this feature are fairly obvious, but note, in particular that our to-dos are very much embedded in the appropriate workspace like the reminders shown in figures 2 and 3: The messages and documents to which our to-dos apply are simply represented as having ‘to-do-ness’ as a property. When to-do items specifically are searched for and
However, he soon learned, from his continued involvement with the fieldwork that even the much simpler paper
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long term basis. At the time of writing, we now feel that it would be difficult to attract users to our system, Raton Laveur, because the hurdle of switching to a new email application is extremely high (due to a dependency on legacy email with application-dependent organization schemes, which both authors finally realized would make switching applications unattractive to most users). We have, therefore, repositioned our latest incarnation of the system as an infrastructure for a server-based shared document and email archive and re-designed it with further prospectiveuser input from the ground-up so that it is better adapted for this purpose. We are currently in the process of implementing several applications based on this new platform, with plans for systematic evaluation involving beta-testers in the near future.
meeting-notes management design idea suffered two fatal flaws: •
It would have imposed an additional and troublesome scanning step into the PIM process that would have deterred use. • The kinds of scanners our designs required are still almost absent from today’s workplaces. Since there was no separation between fieldwork and design, there was no battle to fight to convince an unwilling engineer to relinquish a precious, hard-wrought prototype. Instead our design conceptions and implemented code were abandoned as soon as it became clear that we were headed in an unpromising direction. Through our fieldwork, we not only found answers to our questions about PIM, but, because we were constantly conscious of the design imperative to build something people might actually find useful for PIM, we also found better field questions to ask. By carefully evolving our questions away from our initial ideas about the domain of PIM, we were sensitized to new issues that might be tractable to a design innovation, such as the embedding of PIM in easy-to-get-at resources and the prevalence of email as a central online resource that might be open to design refinements that would improve its PIM capabilities.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
We thank all of the participants in our study for their time and Paul Dourish for comments on a draft of this paper. REFERENCES 1. Barreau, D., & Nardi, B. Finding and Reminding: File Organization from the Desktop. SIGCHI Bulletin, 27,3,39-43 (1995). 2. Beyer, H. & Holtzblatt, K. Contextual Design: Defining Customer-Centered Systems. Morgan Kaufman, CA, 1998. 3. Carroll, J. & Rosson, M. B. Paradox of the Active User. In J. Carroll (Ed.) Interfacing Thought: Cognitive Aspects of Human-Computer Interaction. MIT Press, 1987. 4. Cole, I. Human Aspects of Office Filing: Implications for the Electronic Office, in Proceedings of Human Factors Society (Seattle, WA, 1982), 59-63. 5. Dourish, P., Edwards, K., LaMarca, A. & Salisbury, M. Presto: An Experimental Architecture for Fluid Interactive Document Spaces, in ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction, 6, 2 (1999). 6. Heiner, J., Hudson, S. & Tanaka, K. Linking and Messaging from Real Paper in the Paper PDA, CHI Letters, Vol 1, No.1, pp. 179-186, November 1999. 7. Kidd, A. The Marks are on the Knowledge Worker, in Proceedings of CHI94 (Boston MA, April 1994) ACM Press, 186191. 8. Lansdale M. "The Psychology of Information Management." Applied Ergonomics, 19, 55-66. 1988. 9. Mackay, W. More than Just a Communication System: Diversity in the Use of Electronic Mail, in Proceedings of CSCW’88 (Portland OR, September 1988). ACM Press, 344-353. 10. Malone, T. How do people organize their desktops? Implications for the design of office information systems, ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems, 1, 99-112, 1983. 11. Mander, R., Salomon, G., and Wong, Y. A ‘Pile’ Metaphor for Supporting Casual Organization of Information, in Proceedings of CHI’92 (Monterey, CA, May 1992) ACM Press, 627634. 12. Marchionini, G. 1989. Information-seeking Strategies of Novices Using a Full-Text Electronic Encyclopaedia. Journal. American Soc. Information Science, 40(1), 54-66. 13. Payne, S. Understanding Calendar Use. Journal of HumanComputer Interaction, 8, 2, (1993) 83-100. 14. Strauss, A. & Corbin, J. Basics of Qualitative Research. Sage Publications, 1998. 15. Trigg, R., Blomberg, J. & Suchman, L. et al. Moving Document Collections Online: The Evolution of a Shared Document Repository, in proceedings of ECSCW’99, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 331-350. 16. Whittaker, S., & Sidner C. Email Overload: Exploring Per-
While our method of iterative fieldwork and throw-away prototyping is not especially novel, we believe it is quite rare for field researchers and engineers to work this closely together. Neither of the authors experienced a design process like this before where both were involved in the fieldwork and in the design decisions, with no risk of partisan thinking based on different vested interests in the design process. The end result of our design journey was quite unusual because, while we remained committed to the same design problem–how to support PIM–we arrived at a solution that bears no resemblance to what we initially planned. This is not a case of refining or influencing design, the usual role for fieldwork, rather we have switched to a completely orthogonal approach to the problem space. The email-centric, embedded PIM version of Raton Laveur is a response to real practices and requirements of personal computer users. We believe that those users will continue to use paper to support all manner of functions, but it may be a long time before the infrastructure required to support paper-based PIM is common and cheap enough to use. By that time tablet computers or PDAs will quite probably be much more effective competing solutions than they are today and may well obviate the argument for a paper-PDA. FUTURE PLANS
Of course our design story is still in progress. We have only built the Raton Laveur prototype as a demonstration of our idea of embedded PIM and we have not conducted any evaluation beyond having one of us use the system on a
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