Project Fragmentation The Project Fragmentation Problem in Personal Information Management Bergman, et al CHI 2006 proceedings

Fragmentation  Information stored by format, rather than by purpose  Documents files in folders  in different folders  Bookmarks in a separate hierarchy  When you want all the information about a particular project or activity, what do you do?

Research study  Basic question:  Do people tend to work on materials based on format (as supported by current systems) or by purpose (as the researchers assume.)  Participants:  20 adults  Mix of PC (most) and Mac (1) and combination experience  Materials collected:  Interviews, screenshots, questionnaires

Research Questions  How do personal computer users tend to talk about their information organization -- in terms of technological format or in terms of projects?  To what extent do users work on projects involving information items of different formats  How much overlap is there between the three folder hierarchies  Do users tend to classify their information according to format or porjects  To what extent does interface design affect the project fragmentation problem?  What are users’ attitudes towards integration of the different hierarchies?

Method  Each subject was interviewed for about 90 minutes, giving the interviewer a tour of the subject’s computer system, explaining the organization.  Screenshots were captured during the “tour”  The interview was taped, transcribed, and analyzed.  A questionnaire was administered after the interview.

Results: How do users talk aobut information organization?  Data: the interview transcript  Two judges reviewed it, looking for references to project or format that were not results to direct questions from the interviewer. Only cases where the judges agreed were counted  Results: On average, 70.52% (SD= 16.35) of the references were to projects, 28.26% (SD= 15.22) were to formats  Conclusion: Users think of their information organization in terms of projects rather than formats

Results: Projects involving multiple formats  Data: Screen captures from the day before the interview (using history and recent documents files) Participants annotated each reference with the relevant project.  Result: on average, 55.57% (SD = 32.61%) of items referred to a project which also had an item in a different format set.  Conclusion: Users have information related to a particular project in more than one format.

Result: Extent of overlap among the three types of format  Data: Screen capture of the folder hierarchies. Overlap defined as folders of the different formats that refer to the same project  Only root level folders examined  Results: 19.79% of folders overlap (SD = 19.38)  Conclusion: About one fifth of the folders corresponded to a folder of the same project information in another format Note the difference between this and the previous one -- overlap by project vs. overlap by information format

Result: Do users classify by format or project?  Data: Examination of the 968 folders found among the participants  Result: Project folder names (M=79.94%, SD 11.91) significantly higher than the proportion of format folder names (M = 6.16, SD = 7.3)  Conclusion: Users tend to classify their information according to project more than to formats I’m not sure what is meant by “format folder names”

Result: Effect of interface design  Data: Questionnaire  Results: Users mix documents of different types in one folder, but rarely save s and bookmarks in these document folders.  Conclusion: Interface design guides location of information storage.

Result: Attitudes toward integration of the hierarchies?  Data: Questionnaire  Result: Average answer was 3.74 (on a 5- point scale)  Conclusion?

Possible integration solutions  Three approaches  Integration through search  Find items of multiple formats from one search  Users seem to prefer navigation (see previous paper on that study)  Integration through additional structure  Shortcut to actual item stored in a separate structure.  Single Hierarchy  All project related items, of whatever format, stored together.

Proposed single hierarchy solution All items of one project together, but separated by tabs What do you think of this strategy?