Fewer clicks and less frustration: reducing the cost of reaching the right folder

ABSTRACT

Helping computer users rapidly locate files in their folder hierarchies has become an important research topic in today's intelligent user interface design. This paper reports on FolderPredictor, a software system that can reduce the cost of locating files in hierarchical folders. FolderPredictor applies a cost-sensitive prediction algorithm to the user's previous file access information to predict the next folder that will be accessed. Experimental results show that, on average, FolderPredictor reduces the cost of locating a file by 50%. Another advantage of FolderPredictor is that it does not require users to adapt to a new interface, but rather meshes with the existing interface for opening files on the Windows platform.

REFERENCES

• 1: Deborah Barreau , Bonnie A. Nardi, Finding and reminding: file organization from the desktop, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, v.27 n.3, p.39-43, July 1995 [doi>10.1145/221296.221307]
• 2: Richard Boardman , M. Angela Sasse, "Stuff goes into the computer and doesn't come out": a cross-tool study of personal information management, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.583-590, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985766]
• 3: Jay Budzik , Kristian J. Hammond, User interactions with everyday applications as context for just-in-time information access, Proceedings of the 5th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, p.44-51, January 09-12, 2000, New Orleans, Louisiana, United States [doi>10.1145/325737.325776]
• 4: Code Sector Inc. Direct Folders, http://www.codesector.com/directfolders.asp
• 5: Paul Dourish , W. Keith Edwards , Anthony LaMarca , John Lamping , Karin Petersen , Michael Salisbury , Douglas B. Terry , James Thornton, Extending document management systems with user-specific active properties, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.18 n.2, p.140-170, April 2000 [doi>10.1145/348751.348758]
• 6: Anton N. Dragunov , Thomas G. Dietterich , Kevin Johnsrude , Matthew McLaughlin , Lida Li , Jonathan L. Herlocker, TaskTracer: a desktop environment to support multi-tasking knowledge workers, Proceedings of the 10th international conference on Intelligent user interfaces, January 10-13, 2005, San Diego, California, USA [doi>10.1145/1040830.1040855]
• 7: Susan Dumais , Edward Cutrell , JJ Cadiz , Gavin Jancke , Raman Sarin , Daniel C. Robbins, Stuff I've seen: a system for personal information retrieval and re-use, Proceedings of the 26th annual international ACM SIGIR conference on Research and development in informaion retrieval, July 28-August 01, 2003, Toronto, Canada [doi>10.1145/860435.860451]
• 8: Horvitz, E., Breese, J., Heckerman, D., Hovel, D. and Rommelse, K. The Lumiere Project: Bayesian User Modeling for Inferring the Goals and Needs of Software Users. Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Uncertainty in Artificial Intelligence, July 1998.
• 9: William Jones , Ammy Jiranida Phuwanartnurak , Rajdeep Gill , Harry Bruce, Don't take my folders away!: organizing personal information to get ghings done, CHI '05 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 02-07, 2005, Portland, OR, USA [doi>10.1145/1056808.1056952]
• 10: Susanne Jul , George W. Furnas, Navigation in electronic worlds: a CHI 97 workshop, ACM SIGCHI Bulletin, v.29 n.4, p.44-49, Oct. 1997 [doi>10.1145/270950.270979]
• 11: Andrew J. Ko , Htet Aung , Brad A. Myers, Eliciting design requirements for maintenance-oriented IDEs: a detailed study of corrective and perfective maintenance tasks, Proceedings of the 27th international conference on Software engineering, May 15-21, 2005, St. Louis, MO, USA [doi>10.1145/1062455.1062492]
• 12: Pattie Maes, Agents that reduce work and information overload, Communications of the ACM, v.37 n.7, p.30-40, July 1994 [doi>10.1145/176789.176792]
• 13: Pietrek, M. Windows 95 System Programming Secrets. IDG Books Worldwide, Inc., Foster City, CA 94404, USA, ISBN 1-56884-318-6, 1995.
• 14: Rennie, J. ifile: An application of machine learning to e-mail filtering. In Proc. KDD 2000 Workshop on Text Mining, Boston, MA, 2000.
• 15: Bradley Rhodes, Using Physical Context for Just-in-Time Information Retrieval, IEEE Transactions on Computers, v.52 n.8, p.1011-1014, August 2003 [doi>10.1109/TC.2003.1223636]
• 16: Richard Segal , Jeffrey O. Kephart, Incremental Learning in SwiftFile, Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Conference on Machine Learning, p.863-870, June 29-July 02, 2000
• 17: Richard B. Segal , Jeffrey O. Kephart, MailCat: an intelligent assistant for organizing e-mail, Proceedings of the third annual conference on Autonomous Agents, p.276-282, April 1999, Seattle, Washington, United States [doi>10.1145/301136.301209]
• 18: St. Clair Software. Default Folder X, http://www.stclairsoft.com/DefaultFolderX/
• 19: Stumpf, S., Bao, X., Dragunov, A., Dietterich, T. G., Herlocker, J., Johnsrude, K., Li, L., Shen, J. Predicting User Tasks: I Know What You're Doing! 20th National Conference on Artificial Intelligence (AAAI-05), Workshop on Human Comprehensible Machine Learning, Pittsburgh, PA, 2005.
• 20: Jaime Teevan , Christine Alvarado , Mark S. Ackerman , David R. Karger, The perfect search engine is not enough: a study of orienteering behavior in directed search, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.415-422, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985692.985745]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.3 INFORMATION STORAGE AND RETRIEVAL
      H.3.3 Information Search and Retrieval

Additional Classification:
  H. Information Systems
  H.5 INFORMATION INTERFACES AND PRESENTATION (I.7)
      H.5.2 User Interfaces (D.2.2, H.1.2, I.3.6)
          Subjects: User-centered design

  I. Computing Methodologies
  I.2 ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
      I.2.6 Learning
          Subjects: Knowledge acquisition

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
activities, directories, folders, intelligent user interfaces, machine learning, prediction, recommendation, shortcuts, tasks, user interface