How do people organize their desktops?

ABSTRACT

Knowledge workers today have a lot of digital documents to manage, and most employ some sort of organizational system or scheme to help them. Most commonly used software provides the ability to create a hierarchical organization, but the appropriateness of this structure for personal digital document management has not been established. This research aims to understand how people currently organize their documents, identify the strengths and weaknesses of current systems and explore the usefulness of other information structures. This should provide insight into how personal digital document management systems can be made more usable.

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: Paul Dourish , W. Keith Edwards , Anthony LaMarca , Michael Salisbury, Presto: an experimental architecture for fluid interactive document spaces, ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), v.6 n.2, p.133-161, June 1999 [doi>10.1145/319091.319099]
• 3: Nicolas Ducheneaut , Victoria Bellotti, E-mail as habitat: an exploration of embedded personal information management, interactions, v.8 n.5, p.30-38, Sept./Oct. 2001 [doi>10.1145/382899.383305]
• 4: Managerial information overload, Communications of the ACM, v.45 n.10, p.127-131, October 2002 [doi>10.1145/570907.570909]
• 5: 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]
• 6: Lansdale, M. The psychology of personal information management. Applied Ergonomics, 19 (1). 55--66.
• 7: Wendy E. Mackay, More than just a communication system: diversity in the use of electronic mail, Proceedings of the 1988 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work, p.344-353, September 26-28, 1988, Portland, Oregon, United States [doi>10.1145/62266.62293]
• 8: 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]
• 9: Jun Rekimoto, Time-machine computing: a time-centric approach for the information environment, Proceedings of the 12th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.45-54, November 07-10, 1999, Asheville, North Carolina, United States [doi>10.1145/320719.322582]
• 10: George Robertson , Mary Czerwinski , Kevin Larson , Daniel C. Robbins , David Thiel , Maarten van Dantzich, Data mountain: using spatial memory for document management, Proceedings of the 11th annual ACM symposium on User interface software and technology, p.153-162, November 01-04, 1998, San Francisco, California, United States [doi>10.1145/288392.288596]
• 11: 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]
• 12: 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)

General Terms:
Design, Human Factors

Keywords:
document management, document organization, personal information management