It's not that important: demoting personal information of low subjective importance using GrayArea

ABSTRACT

Users find it hard to delete unimportant personal information which often results in cluttered workspaces. We present a full design cycle for GrayArea, a novel interface that allows users to demote unimportant files by dragging them to a gray area at the bottom of their file folders. Demotion is an intermediate option between keeping and deleting. It combines the advantages of deletion (unimportant files don't compete for attention) and keeping (files are retrieved in their folder context). We developed the GrayArea working prototype using thorough iterative design. We evaluated it by asking 96 participants to 'clean' two folders with, and without, GrayArea. Using GrayArea reduced folder clutter by 13%. Further, 81% of participants found it easier to demote than delete files, and most indicated they would use GrayArea if provided in their operating systems. The results provide strong evidence for the demotion principle suggested by the user-subjective approach.

REFERENCES

• 1: David Abrams , Ron Baecker , Mark Chignell, Information archiving with bookmarks: personal Web space construction and organization, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems, p.41-48, April 18-23, 1998, Los Angeles, California, United States [doi>10.1145/274644.274651]
• 2: Deborah K. Barreau, Context as a factor in personal information management systems, Journal of the American Society for Information Science, v.46 n.5, p.327-339, June 1995 [doi>10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(199506)46:5<327::AID-ASI4>3.0.CO;2-C]
• 3: 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]
• 4: Victoria Bellotti , Nicolas Ducheneaut , Mark Howard , Ian Smith , Rebecca E. Grinter, Quality versus quantity: e-mail-centric task management and its relation with overload, Human-Computer Interaction, v.20 n.1, p.89-138, June 2005 [doi>10.1207/s15327051hci2001&2_4]
• 5: Victoria Bellotti , Ian Smith, Informing the design of an information management system with iterative fieldwork, Proceedings of the 3rd conference on Designing interactive systems: processes, practices, methods, and techniques, p.227-237, August 17-19, 2000, New York City, New York, United States [doi>10.1145/347642.347728]
• 6: Bergman, O. The use of subjective attributes in personal information management systems. Ph.D. Dissertation (in Hebrew), Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel, 2006.
• 7: Ofer Bergman , Ruth Beyth-Marom , Rafi Nachmias, The user-subjective approach to personal information management systems, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.54 n.9, p.872-878, June 2003 [doi>10.1002/asi.10283]
• 8: Ofer Bergman , Ruth Beyth-Marom , Rafi Nachmias, The user-subjective approach to personal information management systems design: Evidence and implementations, Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, v.59 n.2, p.235-246, January 2008 [doi>10.1002/asi.v59:2]
• 9: Ofer Bergman , Ruth Beyth-Marom , Rafi Nachmias , Noa Gradovitch , Steve Whittaker, Improved search engines and navigation preference in personal information management, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.26 n.4, p.1-24, September 2008 [doi>10.1145/1402256.1402259]
• 10: Ofer Bergman , Richard Boardman , Jacek Gwizdka , William Jones, Personal information management, CHI '04 extended abstracts on Human factors in computing systems, April 24-29, 2004, Vienna, Austria [doi>10.1145/985921.986164]
• 11: Boardman, R. Improving tool support for personal information management. Ph.D., Imperial College, London, 2004.
• 12: 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]
• 13: Bruce, H. Personal anticipated information need. Information Research 10, 3 (2005).
• 14: Edward Cutrell , Susan T. Dumais , Jaime Teevan, Searching to eliminate personal information management, Communications of the ACM, v.49 n.1, January 2006 [doi>10.1145/1107458.1107492]
• 15: Eric Freeman , David Gelernter, Lifestreams: a storage model for personal data, ACM SIGMOD Record, v.25 n.1, p.80-86, March 1996 [doi>10.1145/381854.381893]
• 16: Jim Gemmell , Gordon Bell , Roger Lueder , Steven Drucker , Curtis Wong, MyLifeBits: fulfilling the Memex vision, Proceedings of the tenth ACM international conference on Multimedia, December 01-06, 2002, Juan-les-Pins, France [doi>10.1145/641007.641053]
• 17: Harper, R., Rodden, T., Roggers, Y. and Sellen, A. Being human: Hci in 2020. Microsoft, Cambridge, UK, 2008.
• 18: 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]
• 19: Jones, W. and Teevan, J. Personal information management. University of Washington Press, 2007.
• 20: Jones, W. P. Finders, keepers? The present and future perfect in support of personal information management. First Monday 9, 3 (2004).
• 21: Kahneman, D. and Tversky, A. Prospect theory: An analysis of decision making under risk. Eugene, Ore., 1979.
• 22: David Kirk , Abigail Sellen , Carsten Rother , Ken Wood, Understanding photowork, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in computing systems, April 22-27, 2006, Montréal, Québec, Canada [doi>10.1145/1124772.1124885]
• 23: Thomas W. Malone, How do people organize their desks?: Implications for the design of office information systems, ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), v.1 n.1, p.99-112, Jan. 1983 [doi>10.1145/357423.357430]
• 24: Neisser, U. Visual search. Scientific American 210, 6 (1964), 94--102.
• 25: Helen Sharp , Yvonne Rogers , Jenny Preece, Interaction Design: Beyond Human Computer Interaction, John Wiley & Sons, 2007
• 26: Ben Shneiderman, Designing the User Interface: Strategies for Effective Human-Computer Interaction, Addison-Wesley Longman Publishing Co., Inc., Boston, MA, 1997
• 27: Treisman, A. and Gelade, G. A feature-integration theory of attention. Cognitive Psychology 12 (1980), 97--136.
• 28: Steve Whittaker, Supporting collaborative task management in e-mail, Human-Computer Interaction, v.20 n.1, p.49-88, June 2005 [doi>10.1207/s15327051hci2001&2_3]
• 29: Steve Whittaker , Julia Hirschberg, The character, value, and management of personal paper archives, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.8 n.2, p.150-170, June 2001 [doi>10.1145/376929.376932]
• 30: Steve Whittaker , Quentin Jones , Loren Terveen, Contact management: identifying contacts to support long-term communication, Proceedings of the 2002 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work, November 16-20, 2002, New Orleans, Louisiana, USA [doi>10.1145/587078.587109]
• 31: Steve Whittaker , Candace Sidner, Email overload: exploring personal information management of email, Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems: common ground, p.276-283, April 13-18, 1996, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada [doi>10.1145/238386.238530]

INDEX TERMS

Primary 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: Evaluation/methodology

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

General Terms:
Design

Keywords:
demotion, files, personal information management, subjective importance, user-subjective