Timely reminders: a case study of temporal guidance in PIM and email tools usage

ABSTRACT

We describe our research in progress that explores the use of personal information management (PIM) tools in time and attempts to establish temporal attributes of information. We report on a short field study undertaken to examine relations between tools and information life-cycle. We propose four information types: prospective, ephemeral, working and retrospective. We outline relationships between PIM tools, email and different types of information. We use this framework to explain problems observed with handling information.

REFERENCES

• 1: Bellotti, V., Smith, I. How Computers Turn Users intro Scatterbrains: A Study of Personal Information Management. Xerox PARC internal technical report available from the authors. 1999.
• 2: Keirsey, D. Temperament and Character Web Site. http://keirsey.com/ 1999.
• 3: 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]
• 4: Myers-Briggs, I., Myers, P. B. Gifts Differing: Understanding Personality Type. Davies-Black Publishing. 3rd ed. 1995.
• 5: Nardi, B., Anderson, K. and Erickson, T. Filing and Finding Computer Files. Proceedings of the East-West HCI, Moscow, Russia, July'95. 1995.
• 6: Norman, D. A. Design of Everyday Things. NYL Basic Books. 1988.
• 7: 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

Keywords:
email use, field study, information types, personal information management, temporal attributes of information