Making It Real: Towards Practical Progress in the Management of Personal
Information
alt.chi: See this, hear this, touch this, keep this
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Jones, William
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Thorsteinson, Caleb
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Thepvongsa, Brandon
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Garrett, Tanner
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.571-582
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: Discussion of a need for and potential of a study of human-information
interaction is decades old. However, this discussion gains added impetus as
computing technology and advances in HCI improve the transparency of access to
information and "liberate" this information from dependency on a specific
device for its persistence. But personal information is bound in other ways,
most notably to a supporting application or service and in ways that resist
liberation. This paper argues for a let-it-lie approach where a new class of
applications might be "applied" to the information in situ through an API
supported by its hosting application or service. The approach is illustrated
through review of an itemMirror platform for the development of JavaScript web
applications.
For Richer, for Poorer, in Sickness or in Health...: The Long-Term
Management of Personal Information
Workshop Summaries
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Jones, William
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Bellotti, Victoria
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Capra, Robert
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Dinneen, Jesse David
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Mark, Gloria
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Marshall, Catherine
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Moffatt, Karyn
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Teevan, Jaime
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Van Kleek, Maximus
Extended Abstracts of the ACM CHI'16 Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems
2016-05-07
v.2
p.3508-3515
© Copyright 2016 ACM
Summary: People are amassing large personal information stores. These stores present
rich opportunities for analysis and use in matters of wealth, health, living
and legacy. But these stores also bring with them new challenges for managing
information across long periods of time. Hence personal information management
(PIM) research increasingly must address the long term. For the seventh PIM
workshop in a successful series started in 2005, we propose taking a look at
personal information with exactly this longitudinal perspective. We expect the
workshop to attract a range of people doing research related to PIM, HCI,
personal digital archiving, aging, and the design of informational spaces for
later life. Attendees will discuss issues related to storing information for
the long run, how stored information can benefit a person throughout their
lifetime (and into old age), and the legacy of a person's personal information.
"For Telling" the Present: Using the Delphi Method to Understand Personal
Information Management Practices
Empowering Users
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Jones, William
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Capra, Robert
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Diekema, Anne
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Teevan, Jaime
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Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel
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Dinneen, Jesse David
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Hemminger, Bradley
Proceedings of the ACM CHI'15 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2015-04-18
v.1
p.3513-3522
© Copyright 2015 ACM
Summary: Researchers have been studying personal information management (PIM) for
many years, but little exists by way of practical advice for how individuals
should manage their own information. We employed the Delphi Method to engage
PIM researchers with expertise in a variety of relevant areas in a five-round
extended dialog about PIM practices. Participants identified key everyday
choices of PIM, suggested alternatives, and identified pros and cons of each
alternative. Our contributions include: 1) a set of 36 PIM practices, along
with pros, cons, and recommendations for or against each practice, 2)
directions of future research and development including "near-future"
improvements in tool support and 3) a detailed description of how we applied
the Delphi Method to study PIM and how it might be used more widely in HCI
research as a complement to more established methods of inquiry.
Representing our information structures for research and for everyday use
alt.chi
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Jones, William
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Anderson, Kenneth M.
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Whittaker, Steve
Extended Abstracts of ACM CHI'12 Conference on Human Factors in Computing
Systems
2012-05-05
v.2
p.151-160
© Copyright 2012 ACM
Summary: We argue for a methodology and supporting infrastructure that promotes a
cross-study investigation of information structure to advance the science of
personal information management. Moreover, we observe that the infrastructure
to support a methodology of scientific inquiry may have direct application to
users as they struggle to manage their information. Research on information
structure reaches towards a new age in information management wherein
organizing information structures grow and change over time based on the
internal needs of their owners and not the external demands of tools.
Many views, many modes, many tools & one structure
Track 2: emerging structures and ubiquitous hypermedia
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Jones, William
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Anderson, Kenneth M.
Proceedings of the 22nd ACM Conference on Hypertext and Hypermedia
2011-06-06
p.113-122
© Copyright 2011 ACM
Summary: People yearn for more integration of their information. But tools meant to
help often do the opposite-pulling people and their information in different
directions. Fragmentation is potentially worsened as personal information moves
onto the Web and into a myriad of special-purpose, mobile-enabled applications.
How can tool developers innovate "non-disruptively" in ways that do not force
people to re-organize or re-locate their information? This paper makes two
arguments: 1. An integration of personal information is not likely to happen
through some new release of a desktop operating system or via a Web-based
"super tool." 2. Instead, integration is best supported through the development
of a standards-based infrastructure that makes provision for the shared
manipulation of common structure by any number of tools, each in its own way.
To illustrate this approach, the paper describes an XML-based schema,
considerations in its design and its current use in three separate tools. The
schema in its design and use builds on the lessons learned by the open
hypermedia and structural computing communities while moving forward with new
techniques that address some of the changes introduced by the evolution of the
term "application" to move beyond desktop apps to mobile apps, cloud-based apps
and various hybrid architectures.
XooML: XML in support of many tools working on a single organization of
personal information
Design
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Jones, William
Proceedings of the 2011 iConference
2011-02-08
p.478-488
© Copyright 2011 ACM
Summary: XooML takes a step towards addressing a basic tension in the development of
supporting tools of Personal Information Management (PIM) and, more generally,
in the development of computer-based tools for end users: How to innovate
without forcing people to re-organize or re-locate their information? Seven
considerations in the design of a XooML schema follow from experiences in the
iterative evaluation and development of a Planz prototype. Considerations take
aim on a vision of PIM: One integrative structure for the organization of
personal information; many tools in support of this structure, its creation and
its life-long elaborative use.
Planz to put our digital information in its place
alt.chi: i need your input
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Jones, William
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Hou, Dawei
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Sethanandha, Bhuricha Deen
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Bi, Sheng
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Gemmell, Jim
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2010 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2010-04-10
v.2
p.2803-2812
Keywords: PIM, personal information management, project planning
© Copyright 2010 ACM
Summary: Planz provides a single, integrative document-like overlay to a folder
hierarchy through the dynamic, on-demand assembly of XML fragments. This
overlay provides a context in which to create or reference not only files but
also email messages, web pages and informal notes. This paper describes an
evaluation of Planz over a period of several days during which participants
compared their experiences on two projects -- one involving "status quo"
methods, a second project involving Planz. Also discussed is an architecture
that extends on the front-end to provide additional overlays and on the
back-end in support of additional information stores. Work on Planz is guided
by a vision of "structural integrity": Many tools, many modes of interaction
applied to a common structure for the organization of and access to personal
information.
INTERNET
DUB Group - Design : Use : Build
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Wobbrock, Jacob O.
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Anderson, Richard
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Aragon, Cecilia R.
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Borning, Alan
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Borriello, Gaetano
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Cheng, Karen
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Demiris, George
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Efthimiadis, Efthimis N.
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Farkas, David K.
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Feil, Magnus
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Fogarty, James
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Friedman, Batya
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Gould, Annabelle
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Hendry, David G
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Johnson, Brian R.
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Johnson, Kurt L.
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Jones, William
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Kientz, Julie A.
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Ko, Andrew J.
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Kolko, Beth
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Kriz, Sarah
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Ladner, Richard E.
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Landay, James A.
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Lee, Charlotte P.
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McDonald, David W.
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Muren, Dominic L
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Patel, Shwetak N.
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Pratt, Wanda
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Ramey, Judith
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Roesler, Axel
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Spyridakis, Jan
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Tanimoto, Steve L.
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Turns, Jennifer
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Weld, Daniel S.
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Zachry, Mark
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Baudisch, Patrick
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Davidson, Andrew
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Drucker, Steven M.
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Morris, Meredith Ringel
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Parikh, Tapan
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Tan, Desney
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Wixon, Dennis R.
2010-01-17
United States, Washington, Seattle
University of Washington
Languages: English
Summary: The multi-departmental DUB (design:use:build) group at the University of
Washington.
Summary: The DUB Group comprises faculty and students interested in HCI and Design
research at the University of Washington. It is a cross-campus
multi-departmental group with numerous faculty and students working on
countless projects in HCI.
The personal project planner: planning to organize personal information
Knowledge Elicitation
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Jones, William
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Klasnja, Predrag
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Civan, Andrea
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Adcock, Michael L.
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2008-04-05
v.1
p.681-684
© Copyright 2008 ACM
Summary: Prototyping and evaluation combine to explore ways that an effective,
integrative organization of project-related information might emerge as a
by-product of a person's efforts to plan a project. The Personal Project
Planner works as an extension to the file manager -- providing people with
rich-text overlays to their information. Document-like project plans provide a
context in which to create or reference documents, email messages, web pages,
etc. that are needed to complete the plan. The user can later locate an
information item such as an email message with reference to the plan (e.g., as
an alternative to searching through the inbox or sent mail). Results of an
interim evaluation of the Planner are very promising and suggest special
directions of focus for limited available prototyping resources.
The disappearing desktop: PIM 2008
Workshops
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Teevan, Jaime
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Jones, William
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2008 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2008-04-05
v.2
p.3917-3920
© Copyright 2008 ACM
Summary: In an ideal world, we would always have the right information, in the right
form, with the right context, right when we needed it. Unfortunately, we do not
live in an ideal world. This workshop looks at how people in the real world
manage to process massive amounts of information, and discusses how tools can
bring real information interactions closer to the ideal.
Introduction to keeping, refinding and sharing personal information
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Barreau, Deborah
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Capra, Robert
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Dumais, Susan
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Jones, William
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Pérez-Quiñones, Manuel
ACM Transactions on Information Systems
2008
v.26
n.4
p.18
© Copyright 2008 ACM
AUTHORED BOOK
Keeping found things found: the study and practice of personal information
management
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Jones, William P.
2008
p.430
Morgan Kaufmann Publishers
I. Foundations
1. A study and a practice
2. A personal space of information
3. A framework for personal information management
II: Activities
4. Finding and re-finding: From need to information
5. Keeping and organizing: From information to need
6. Maintaining information for now and for later
7. Managing privacy and the flow of information
8. Measuring and evaluating
9. Making sense of things
III: Solutions
10. Email disappears?
11. Search gets personal
12. PIM on the go;
13. PIM on the Web;
IV: Conclusions
14. Bringing the pieces together
15. Finding our way in/to the future
"Get real!": what's wrong with hci prototyping and how can we fix it?
Interactive session
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Jones, William
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Spool, Jared
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Grudin, Jonathan
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Bellotti, Victoria
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Czerwinski, Mary
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2007-04-28
v.2
p.1913-1916
© Copyright 2007 ACM
Summary: A prototype of computing technology as a means to evaluate and communicate a
good idea is often an essential step towards useful, shipping products and
towards a deeper understanding of what people really need. Prototyping and user
evaluation can be enormously expensive and failure rates are high. Moreover,
prototype user evaluations are often far from real with respect to user
representatives, tasks, and measures. But to get real in HCI prototyping and
evaluations risks placing even greater (more unrealistic) demands upon the HCI
researcher. Do very real costs and constraints force HCI prototyping to the
margins? Can we change acceptable HCI prototyping methods, helping HCI
prototyping "get real," in both its conduct and in the implications of its
results.
Project contexts to situate personal information
Demos
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Jones, William
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Bruce, Harry
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Foxley, Austin
Proceedings of the 29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on
Research and Development in Information Retrieval
2006-08-06
p.729
© Copyright 2006 ACM
Summary: The Personal Project Planner prototype works as an extension to the file
manager to provide people with rich-text overlays to their information
(folders, files and also email, web pages, notes). Rich-text, document-like
project plans can be created which then provide a context in which to create or
reference the email messages, electronic documents, web pages, etc. that are
needed to complete the plan. The user can later locate an information item such
as an email message with reference to the plan (e.g., as an alternative to a
mostly context-free search through the inbox or sent mail). The Planner
explores a possibility that an effective organization of project-related
information can emerge as a natural by-product of efforts to plan and structure
the project.
"It's about the information stupid!": why we need a separate field of
human-information interaction
Panels
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Jones, William
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Pirolli, Peter
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Card, Stuart K.
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Fidel, Raya
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Gershon, Nahum
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Morville, Peter
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Nardi, Bonnie
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Russell, Daniel M.
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2006 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2006-04-22
v.2
p.65-68
© Copyright 2006 ACM
Summary: The past few years have seen increasing discussion of the need for, even the
inevitability of, a field of human-information interaction (HII) -- as either a
major sub-branch of human-computer interaction (HCI) or as a separate field
altogether. The "I" in HII implies a focus on information and not computing
technology. But what does this mean? Is there any way to focus on information
without also considering the supporting tools, applications, and gadgets that
are enabled by computing technology? The panel will explore both the pros and
cons in favor of a separate field of HII. Panelists provide a diversity of
perspectives from several disciplines and research traditions including
cognitive modeling and the study of human cognition, information science,
information architecture, personal information management, ethnography and
anthropology.
INTERNET
Personal Information Management
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Jones, William
2005-12-09
United States, Washington, Seattle
University of Washington, Information School
Keywords: Personal Information Management
Languages: English
Summary: Personal information management or PIM is attracting increasing attention as
an area of study. In the ideal world, we have the right information at the
right time, in the right place, in the right form, and of sufficient
completeness and quality to perform the current activity. Tools and
technologies help so that we spend less time with burdensome and error prone
actions of information management (such as filing). We then have more time to
make creative, intelligent use of the information at hand in order to get
things done
INTERNET
The Keeping Found Things Found Project
/
Jones, William
2005-12-09
United States, Washington, Seattle
University of Washington, Information School
Keywords: Personal Information Management, finding, re-finding, keeping, organizing
information
Languages: English
Summary: The classic problem of information retrieval, simply put, is to help people
find the relatively small number of things they are looking for (books,
articles, web pages, CDs, etc.) from a very large set of possibilities. This
classic problem has been studied in many variations and has been addressed
through a rich diversity of information retrieval tools and techniques.
Summary: A follow-on problem also exists which has received relatively less study:
Once found, how are things organized for re-access and re-use later on? What
can be done to avoid the need to repeat the process by which the information
was found in the first place? (If, indeed, it is possible to repeat this
process.) We refer to this as the problem of Keeping Found Things FoundTM or
KFTF.
Don't take my folders away!: organizing personal information to get things
done
Late breaking results: short papers
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Jones, William
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Phuwanartnurak, Ammy Jiranida
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Gill, Rajdeep
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Bruce, Harry
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2005 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2005-04-02
v.2
p.1505-1508
© Copyright 2005 ACM
Summary: A study explores the way people organize information in support of projects
("teach a course", "plan a wedding", etc.). The folder structures to organize
project information - especially electronic documents and other files -
frequently resembled a "divide and conquer" problem decomposition with
subfolders corresponding to major components (subprojects) of the project.
Folders were clearly more than simply a means to one end: Organizing for later
retrieval. Folders were information in their own right - representing, for
example, a person's evolving understanding of a project and its components.
Unfortunately, folders are often "overloaded" with information. For example,
folders sometimes included leading characters to force an ordering ("aa",
"zz"). And folder hierarchies frequently reflected a tension between organizing
information for current use vs. repeated re-use.
Exploring Communication Between Health Care Professionals and Older Adults
STUDENT FORUM: Cutting-Edge Research by Students II
/
Hickman, Jamye M.
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Pak, Richard
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Stronge, Aideen J.
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Jones, W. Brad
Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society 48th Annual Meeting
2004-09-20
v.48
p.2156-2160
© Copyright 2004 HFES
Summary: The purpose of this study is to understand the communication problems that
older adults may encounter when interacting with their health care
professionals. In particular, we are interested in the types of communication
problems older adults have experienced such as memory, comprehension, and
sensory issues. A structured interview consisting of two parts was designed to
gather this information. The first part focuses on the specific communication
problems participants may have had. The second part of the study involves six
scenarios in which a fictitious patient has a communication problem with a
health care professional. The goal of the scenarios is to determine the types
of strategies, if any, participants recommend using when faced with
communication problems with their health care professional. The findings from
this study will be used to identify and categorize problems and strategies to
inform design solutions to remedy these communication problems.
Personal information management
Special interest groups
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Bergman, Ofer
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Boardman, Richard
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Gwizdka, Jacek
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Jones, William
Proceedings of ACM CHI 2004 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
2004-04-24
v.2
p.1598-1599
© Copyright 2004 ACM
How Do People Get Back to Information on the Web? How Can They Do It Better?
4: Short papers
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Jones, William
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Bruce, Harry
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Dumais, Susan
Proceedings of IFIP INTERACT'03: Human-Computer Interaction
2003-09-01
p.793
© Copyright 2003 IFIP
In Search of the Ideal Operating System for User Interfacing
Panel
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Jones, William
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Williams, Peter
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Robertson, George
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Joloboff, Vania
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Conner, Mike
Proceedings of the 1990 ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and
Technology
1990-10-03
p.31-35
© Copr. 1990 Association for Computing Machinery
A Critical Assessment of Hypertext Systems
Panel
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Fischer, Gerhard
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Weyer, Stephen A.
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Jones, William P.
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Kay, Alan C.
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Kintsch, Walter
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Trigg, Randall H.
Proceedings of ACM CHI'88 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
1988-05-15
p.223-227
How Do We Distinguish the Hyper from the Hype in Non-Linear Text?
5. Forefront Systems and Techniques: 5.6 Novel Application Systems
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Jones, William P.
Proceedings of IFIP INTERACT'87: Human-Computer Interaction
1987-09-01
p.1107-1113
© Copyright 1987 IFIP
Summary: The good news is that non-linear or hypertext systems may dramatically
increase the accessibility of information. The bad news is that this increased
accessibility may magnify further an already severe problem of selection.
Whether we are sending or receiving a body of information, we must take steps
to distinguish its components on the basis of their potential importance or
relevance. Current hypertext efforts have focused on the development of tools
giving users direct control over the formation and traversal of links
connecting units of information in a network structure. Such tools place
considerable power and a considerable burden in the hands of the users.
Information must be initially organized in ways that prove useful later on;
links leading to relevant information must subsequently be distinguished from a
potentially large number of others. These activities may be very difficult to
accomplish in an expanding knowledge base. In this article we look at
potential selection in hypertext and we examine some of the ways in which these
problems may be remedied.
The Memory Extender Personal Filing System
Knowledge-Based Interfaces
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Jones, William P.
Proceedings of ACM CHI'86 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
1986-04-13
p.298-305
© Copr. 1986 Association for Computing Machinery
Summary: The benefits of electronic information storage are enormous and largely
unrealized. As its cost continues to decline, the number of files in the
average user's personal database may increase substantially. How is a user to
keep track of several thousand, perhaps several hundred thousand, files? The
Memory Extender (ME) system improves the user interface to a personal database
by actively modeling the user's own memory for files and for the context in
which these files are used. Files are multiply indexed through a network of
variably weighted term links. Context is similarly represented and is used to
minimize the user input necessary to disambiguate a file. Files are retrieved
from the context through a spreading-activation-like process. The system aims
towards an ideal in which the computer provides a natural extension to the
user's own memory.
