Filing, Piling & Structuring: Strategies for Personal Document Management
Sarah Henderson and Ananth Srinivasan
HICSS 44, Hawaii, 2011
Personal digital document management describes the activities performed by an individual in creating, acquiring, organizing and maintaining collections of their documents. The abundance of digital information that knowledge workers today must manage means that providing useful and usable tools to organize and handle this complexity is more important than ever. In order to better understand the differing approaches people take to document management, a study was conducted involving a combination of in-depth interviews and a survey. Qualitative analysis of the data from the interviews and quantitative analysis of the data from 72 survey participants 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. Understanding of these three strategies can be used to inform the development of better tools to support document management.
- Document label : 2011-HICSS-Filing-Piling-and-Structuring.pdf (547 kB)
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Guidelines for the Design of Personal Document Management User Interfaces
Sarah Henderson
Personal Information Management Workshop at the ASIS&T 2009 Annual Meeting, Vancouver, Canada, 7 November - 8 November 2009.
Personal document management describes the activities performed by an individual in creating, acquiring, organizing and maintaining collections of their documents. A study involving 10 in-depth interviews and a survey of 115 participants was conducted in order to better understand the approaches people take to document management in order to inform the development of better user interfaces. These were used to develop an understanding of issues and concepts in personal document management, and a description of three major approaches to personal document management: a piling strategy, a filing strategy and a structuring strategy. From the findings, some general guidelines are proposed for the development of personal document management user interfaces, along with specific user interface guideline to support each of the three identified approaches to personal document management.
- Document label : 2009-PIM-Workshop-Guidelines-for-the-Design-of-Personal-Document-Management-User-Interfaces.pdf (180 kB)
Caption : Guidelines for the Design of Personal Document Management User Interfaces
An Empirical Analysis of Personal Digital Document Structures
Sarah Henderson and Ananth Srinivasan
HCI International 2009
Hierarchies have long been used as useful structuring mechanisms for organizing and managing documents. This study looks at the problem of personal digital document management in the context of knowledge workers. We study and document strategies that users employ to manage the complexity imposed by the volume and variety of personal digital documents. Exploratory research was conducted, analyzing the file systems of 73 knowledge workers using Microsoft Windows in a university setting. The empirical results of this are presented, and compared to a previous study that examined the file systems of 11 users.
- Document label : 2009-HCII-An-Empirical-Analysis-Of-Personal-Digital-Document-Management (180 kB)
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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.
- Document label : 2009-CHINZ-Personal-Document-Management-Strategies (547 kB)
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Time, Topic, Task & Genre
Most operating systems provide the ability to create folders to contain documents, and to nest these folders to create a hierarchical organization. However, little is known about the kinds of folders people create using this type of organizing scheme, or how they structure those folders.
Exploratory research was conducted, analyzing the folder structures of six knowledge workers and it was found that most folder names represent the genre, task, topic or time dimension of the documents they contained. While these four dimensions were consistent across all participants, the order in which these dimensions are combined into a hierarchical structure varies substantially, even among people with the same job.
A number of interesting areas of investigation are highlighted for future research, including a proposal that these dimensions be treated as facets of document metadata and that exploring faceted navigation interfaces for personal digital document management would be a fruitful area for further research.
- Document label : 2005-CHINZ-Genre-Task-Topic-and-Time-Facets-of-Personal-Digital-Document-Management.pdf (140 kB)
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