Sarah Henderson

Personal Document Management Strategies

Personal document management describes the activities performed by an individual in creating, acquiring, organizing and maintaining collections of their documents. A study involving field studies and a survey of 115 participants was conducted in order to better understand the approaches people take to document management. Qualitative analysis of a field study and quantitative analysis of a survey were used together to develop a description of three major approaches to personal document management: a piling strategy, a filing strategy and a structuring strategy. A user persona was developed to exemplify each strategy; this persona description can be used as a design tool to guide the development of user interfaces for personal document management system. Specific user interface guidelines are suggested to support each of the three identified strategies.