How doesPIM Enter Into People’s Lives?
Wen-Chi Pan
Dec.10. 2008
Introduction
The Internet has revolutionized people’s lives. Before personal information management (PMI) was introduced to the areas of research and business, most people used traditional methods to manage their personal information. Eventually, the Internet led to many online PIM tools.People began using these online PIM systems and the demand for tools to help them manage the overwhelming daily information grew.The integration of Internet and people changed the way people interacted with information and in turn, changed their lives.
The interactions between people and PIMs
Not very long ago, there was a prediction that paper would disappear some day and be replaced by new technologies.Despite the digital resources and technological devices today, people still usepapersfor their everyday work.This reflects the user behavior of personal information management. Because the trend of button-up information structures came from web 2.0, researchers began to notice issues of PIM system usability. It also provided the opportunity to overcome the obscurity of internal knowledge within organizational knowledge management systems.
Although there are more and more open or business applications for personal information management, the traditional physical organizing tools still play important roles in people’s lives, especially “paper.”“Traditions are not always bad”surprisingly has shown true in this field. Despite the availability of impressive new technology, humble paper tools such as day-timers, notepads and folders are still used by most people(Bellotti and Smith 2000). The convenience of data IO (input and output) and availability by paper are difficult to surpass with current computer-based media.Bellotti and Smith(2000)found people though that the laptops are too intrusive for note-taking and PDAs are too slow in their in-depth interviews.According to prior studies [3], people still use a lot of paper-based tools to organize their information or keep track of scheduled meetings. For example, they use memos on the wall as to-do lists and pile related documents on the desk to present the ongoing tasks. Although the result showed that people use many online or offline applications to help them manage their tasks (including e-calendar, email or open windows), the paper-based reminders still play important roles in personal information management. The result also showed that email, notes on paper and e-calendar were more popular on average for to-do lists, but that some tasks didn’t require reminders. For these tasks, people only wanted to use their heads. The study pointed out that the reason users prefer papers is because paper provides a free input format and also is very accessible. Users don’t tend to spend a lot of time inputting the details and they arealso poor at estimating time required doing a task.
Computer-based PIM Applications
The initial function of PIM was a focus on file management, butpeople really began using PIM applications for task management and notes, such as calendars, contacts, and to-do lists. In addition, onlinePIM systems have a powerful ability to help users complete their group works efficiently through the Internet.
Many user behavior studies show that people usually collect and organize their documents by projects. Other methods of organization include specific purposes, events or organizations/people are also another kind of important organizing catalogs.Just like in the daily work environment, people classifydocuments by different topic and pile them on the desks, or separate them by priorities.Due to these user study results, many designs of PIM applications started becoming task-based.
The Bellotti [3] study, the studies examined the different PIM media/tools and tracked how tasks are completed over time and finally toward a task list manager concept named TaskVista. They found out that the task list manager should have some characteristics to meet the users’ information managing habits and provide more benefits by system support. These implications for task list manger design included the diverse ways to view and manipulate to-dos, being able to make the to-do schedules in-the-way and capture the time constrains, having a mechanism for handling stale to-dos, and accept the instant and informal task descriptions. This means the application should allow any level of entries’ abstractions, likepaper tool does.Besides, they also concluded that contrary to the prior researches, people are not poor at prioritizing. The problem with task management is how to assist people in completing the important tasks efficiently with task manager’s support.People express great concern about this problem, which if surmounted leads users to start using PIM tools.
The need for collaborative tools motivated the development of online calendars. There are myriad different solutions for scheduling amongst people, and many of them use more than one method. The e-calendar seems very useful for organize meetings, and that’s the main purpose of a group calendar. Online calendars support workflow in knowledge management The Internet frees collaborative work from time and location constraints, but that also emphasizes the importance of information update and synchronization. Teamwork requires more than what is required for managing personal information and scheduling, and online calendars provide convenient interfaces to solve temporal issues created by collaborative work. Google Calendar uses colorful labels to identify different working projects or responsibilities. From the aspect of group information management, Google Calendar separates individual process in the workflow and the group schedule for the users who have authority; and from the Personal information management perspective, it gives tasks different labels to emphasize each task and match task-based habits in PIM user studies.
Aside from the calendar applications, another general tool for managing collaboration is email. Email’s inclusion with PIM may have started with an accident. The initial email system was developed for exchanging the “electronic mail” and files, just like the post mail in the real world. However, email came to be used for much more than this because of its convenience and functional flexibility. “Outeraction” defined in the “Interaction and Outeraction Instant Messaging Action(Bonnie A. Nardi and Bradner 2000)”: “…is a set of communicative processes outside of information exchange, in which people reach out to others in patently social ways to enable information exchange.”
There are many “things” (application or services) used for online work that go beyond the original purposes for which they were designed. People use them to help them organize and manage their personal information and make the information easier to transfer and share.
Email was broadly used for communicating, exchanging messages and files and becomes one of the most popular computer applications. The contacts and calendar interfaces were usually already included in the email applications such as Microsoft Outlook. It is apparent in that they integrate email and contacts interfaces. On the other hand, many email user studies [1] [2] [3] [4] [9] found out that users are comfortable with scheduling by email. Users use email inboxes as a repository of “to-dos” and “to-reads” items (Bellotti, Duchenueat et al. 2003).
Email users clearly feel overwhelmed and daunted by the time it takes to deal with all the work coming in through email transactions. And email overload and outaction create problems for personal information management. Acknowledging these problems, many recent studies and projects have tried to overhaul email’s interfaces. By the email triage design in [11], Carman and his team applied the concept of social network analysis into the email triage system. Recent work has begun to tackle the challenge of general task management at it plays out in email (Bellotti, Dalal et al. 2004). Many projects embedded task-based concept into email interfaces. Google’s Gmail treats email in the inbox as many threads (tasks). Bellotti, V. and I. Smith (2000) thought, since many responses they heard from their interviewees underlined the need for embedded information management capabilities online in email. It seemed email is the application that is most likely to be open at anytime. Combining usability factors and the various functions of email, the design put email at its core. The design and evaluation of PIM tools in another study [4], is an example of a task-management-centered email tools.
Another interesting finding with email is that many users choose to use web-based email rather than client-based email applications. Users are beginning to access and manage their personal information on the Web. The webmail systems built trust that they can storage users’ email safely, and supported access to their account on any computer as long as they can connect to the Internet.
The simplicity is also a factor for users. The success of webmail is due to the webmail is very easy for using.The webmail interfaces don’t need user to set the protocol data, such as POP3 or IMAP, which need to set inthe general complex email applications. On the other hand, many interviewees of Bellotti and Smith (2000)’s study complained about the complexity of online calendars or only used very basic and restricted functions. The reason is that people take PIM applications as tools to help them improve efficiency, not to spend more time on learning how to use.
Digitizing documents is hard work for users. People don’t like to spend time transferring their information by either typing or scanning. In the Bellotti and Smith (2000)’s initial design, their first design was a PDF that also supported scanning. But they found their potential users weren’t interested in inputting data. One good example is that people still use the business cards a lot to manage some part of their contacts, because inputting the contact information is time-consuming and the technology for converting pictures/ handwriting to ASCII is not mature yet (Bellotti and Smith 2000). Compared with the time spent on digitalizing, using the original paper documents like the business cards is more efficient. Moreover, many people still “print out” their data even if they have used PIM tools to manage information. The interview of (Bellotti and Smith 2000) found that some interviewees used online group calendaring solutions, but relied heavily on printed out copies to carry around. As the argument discussed above, users choose to “output” the data for PIM system rather than “input.”
In fact, the opportunity for PIM applications came as more and more data was born digital. People use the digital data directly acquired from the Web, instead of digitalizing or inputting data. This revolution finally popularized PIM applications over traditional information managing methods.
What makes people choose PIM applications?
Most people have a common habit between the ideal of working online and the appreciation of the advantages of paper, but more and more documents are acquired online through email or attachments, people usually read the short ones online, but print out the longer ones. (Bellotti and Smith 2000)
The apparent preference of paper might be due to its attribute as a high resolution, intuitive, lightweight, cheap and flexible medium. (Bellotti and Smith 2000) The designs of PIM applications have to use the advantage of paper to make users change their information behavior. Their in-depth interviews also showed that both online and tangible artifacts can be good reminders only when they are “in-the-way” in the appropriate context. Users expect to spend less time accessing data, and also less time for inputting, retrieving or re-acquiring. To-do list should be visible (meet in-the-way); calendars should be on hand when someone asks; contacts information should be right there when needed. The most important this is that documents should be on the desktop or found in a few seconds.
Paper continues to be used because it is ever-present and handy, and use may be habitual. People have used paper to record information for thousands of years. Ballotti and Smith (2000) found out that people want to use the PIM tool in the same way as their real work environment. The e-calendar is a good example. Other examples include note tools such as StickPad ( which simulates the physical paper notes that allow users “stick” to the note on the computer desktop.
The initial design concept of Ballotti and Smith was to build a paper-based PDA with the purpose of task management. They tried to simulate scheduling work according to the paper-format. But during the user study, they found out that users didn’t response very well. The result means that although paper can’t be totally replaced by computing system, there are still some advantages the system that are better than paper. The most obvious is the organizing and retrieving abilities. These are the major advantages for every information system. Traditional cataloging cannot compare with high efficiency and powerful capability of computing retrieval.
Besides simulating the physical work environment, people prefer to use applications that are already open to support PIM rather than applications that hive off information into separate, awkward-to-access structures such as contact lists or to-do lists. “…A need for embedding better PIM capabilities in common workplaces, which would include online applications such as email and work-processors.” (Bellotti and Smith 2000)Similarly, web browsers require users require users to constantly open them.
PIM goes online
The growth of the Internet brought the changes to PIM development; the Web has a number of distinct advantages as the basis for information collaboration. Web client programs (browsers) now are a basic component of the computing environment and are available for all popular computing platforms and operating systems. The user interfaces of browsers are simple and offer consistent presentation for users, thus users usually don’t need to install additional software to achieve their purposes with the Web. In addition, many organizations have also installed their own Web server as part of an Internet presence or a corporate Intranet. When the information processes need to go into a bigger system such as a knowledge management system, the organization already have the infrastructure and have familiarity with server maintenance. (Bentley, Appelt et al. 1997)
Accessibility is the most impressive advantage of Online PIM. Through the Internet,PIM systems transfer data to be another kind of “readily available” system like paper tools. There are different reachable scopes between the Internet and paper tools. Because of the device requirements and time commitment problems, online PIM systems still have access problem, but online PIM application creates another definition of readily available. The data stored online can be accessed by any node through the Web. Many documents are already created by computers, and their editability take online PIM applications beyond paper-based information management. The stability of the Internet encouraged people to store data online. It might still possible to lose the online document (the reason might be email sending problem, data format error or server’s crash…), but the odds are lower than with paper documents. People can edit the document many times without making the document a mess, and moreover, editing can be done together to schedule the group calendar. Every member in the group can share the current schedule and work process.
Since online PIM systems can compute from remote servers or terminal computers, the to-do list can be more than a clip of small paper when it stored online, but can also be reformatted. Furthermore, PIM also allows users to back up data and reformat for presentability
The first, and also the main, motivation for using online PIM tools is that online PIM extends the “reachability.” People can send their documents anywhere, and online PIM means they don’t need to bring anything. Although online PIM still can’t replace the paper, it supplements the gap of traditional personal information management. The second motivation is the increase of digital resources. People output the data to paper documents due to the readability, but now there’s a common sense that the digital storage make documents easier to modify and retrieve. PIM system is also more environmentally friendly, for instance banks encourage their costumers to manage their accounts online and apply for paperless billing.
The advantages to using online PIM systems are easily apparent to users. Online PIM can be transferred very quickly. It might be difficult to evaluate PIM systems because of the issue of privacy, but sometimes the successes of online interfaces are not only due to the design, but also users’ habits. When users get used one information management tool, especially the online PIM application usually tied with the team work project, it will be very hard to ask them change the system. As this article mentioned before, people don’t like to spend time on inputting data, neither transferring. Because of users’ habits and information sharing behaviors discussed above, the number of online PIM users and the first impression of the interfaces (for example: the interfaces and visual design and the simplicity for using) will decide whether the online PIM successful or not.