Project Fragmentation

1
Project Fragmentation

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

2
Fragmentation

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

3
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

4
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?

5
Method

• Each subject was interviewed for about 90
  minutes, giving the interviewer a tour of the
  subjects 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.

6
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

7
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.

8
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
9
Result Do users classify by format or project?

• Data Examination of the 968 folders found among
  the participants
• Result Project folder names (M79.94, 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

Im not sure what is meant by format folder
names
10
Result Effect of interface design

• Data Questionnaire
• Results Users mix documents of different types
  in one folder, but rarely save emails and
  bookmarks in these document folders.
• Conclusion Interface design guides location of
  information storage.

11
Result Attitudes toward integration of the
hierarchies?

• Data Questionnaire
• Result Average answer was 3.74 (on a 5-point
  scale)
• Conclusion?

12
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.

13
Proposed single hierarchy solution
All items of one project together, but separated
by tabs What do you think of this strategy?