Sarah Henderson

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.