Personal Information

Information & Interaction Design

Mick McQuaid

mcq@utexas.edu

University of Texas at Austin

11 Oct 2025

Week EIGHT

The second half of the course

Recap

In the first half, we explored an approach to interaction design where you
- conduct a contextual inquiry to understand the user’s situation
- develop personas who fit into that situation
- construct scenarios that those personas enact
- create prototypes that will succeed in those scenarios

The second half is information design

Information design

To understand it, we must take a detour through information

The easiest way to understand information is to start with personal information

Why?

Because it’s familiar to everyone

You all have personal information

Maybe passwords, calendars, todo lists, notes, health info, …

What about information?

Information can be controversial to define

Widespread agreement exists, though, about some properties and uses of information.

We can start to explore that through personal information

What is personal information?

Discuss!

With whom it is shared

Scope of sharing (doctor, spouse, heirs)

Importance of information (passwords)

Time value of information (living will, power of attorney)

Are the URLs you bookmark personal information?

Definitions from NSF

In 2005, the National Science Foundation sponsored a workshop on Personal Information Management, attended by many scholars publishing in that field

Information from it (and several subsequent workshsops) was saved at PIM Resources, which no longer exists (a good substitute is at PIM Resources)

It was two years before the iPhone irrevocably changed the landscape of personal information environments

Much of the discussion, though, was technology independent and has lasting value

The next few frames contain definitions from that workshop

Some definitions

Information (they punted on this one!) (remember our definitions from day one)

Information item - a packaging of information, such as an email or webpage

Information form - classification of information items by the tools used to manipulate them

More definitions

Personal information
- information kept for personal use
- information about a person but possibly kept by others
- information experienced by a person

Yet more definitions

PSI \(\Rightarrow\) Personal Space of Information: all the personal information of one person

PIE \(\Rightarrow\) Personal Information Environment: a collection of personal information and the tools to manipulate it, such as an office or a smartphone

PIM (Lansdale 1988) the methods and procedures by which we handle, categorize, and retrieve information on a day-to-day basis

PIM (Barreau 1995) system developed by or created for an individual for personal use in a work environment

PIM Activities

Keeping

Finding and Re-finding

M-level activities, where M stands for either meta or mapping or maintenance plus organization

Information and needs

History

Physical compartments for scrolls and parchments

Benjamin Franklin wrote about his struggles with it

Vanevar Bush wrote “As we may think” in 1945

Lansdale coined the term in 1988

Personal information systems

Extensive research over the past thirty years, some of it by Tom Malone at MIT and Susan Dumais at Microsoft Research, as well as our own Jacek Gwizdka, has explored how people organize personal information.

Two aspects of personal info

The knife analogy

Filers and pilers

Knives in the home

You’ve just won a complete set of knives

WHere to put them?
- One cabinet for knives?
- Distribute them throughout the home

Raises question of task context

Filing: using hierarchies to organize information

Filing refers to organizing items according to categories or classifications or clusters. (Researchers define these three words differently, e.g., classifications are labeled groups, while clusters are unlabeled groups. Some definitions include the notion of a hierarchy.)

If a filer looks for information, it is found in a place where like information is found. That information may be in a nested structure containing more general information at the higher levels and more specific information at the lower levels.

For example, information relevant to your work as a student may be kept in files on a usb drive in a folder called schoolwork. Within that folder may be a separate folder for each course, as well as a separate folder for administrative documents not related to any given course. There might be a folder for each term containing a schedule for that term, grades for that term, and more. On the other hand, you may divide such folders differently: into group work and individual work. Or you may organize according the types of files, with videos in one folder, music in another, and text documents in another.

Piling: using tags to organize information

Piling refers to dumping information where it is most convenient. The piler makes no effort to move information around. Instead, the piler usually uses tags of some kind to find information. The piler may create these tags or take advantage of existing tags.

For example, Mac users employ Spotlight, a local search engine to find files using (mostly) words in the files.
Those words are automatically indexed by Spotlight into a tagging system, especially while the computer is otherwise idle. As another example, the IMDB has a file containing keywords for each movie recorded—if someone cares enough about that movie to type in keywords. You can search for a movie by entering any of these keywords.

What’s problematic about such a system? One issue is that a given user does not necessarily know what keywords are available to describe a given concept. The IMDB tries to overcome this be presenting a display of all the keywords that appear in movies that share the keyword being searched. How else could you try to overcome this limitation?

Another limitation of tags is that words have different senses so that searches for words like net and rock return results that may not be of interest depending on whether the search is for tennis or the web or music or geology. How can you try to overcome this limitation?
One way is to use context. For instance, your browser by default saves the most recent URL you visited as a referrer and makes it possible for the administrator of the next URL to identify it. If my referrer has the string wimbledon in it, am I more likely to be looking for tennis or the web?

A typical business use of tags can be found in Adwords, the main way Google earns revenue. An adword is a tag associated with an advertisement. A business can pay to be advertised when an adword appears in the Google search window.

Best Practices

Readings

Wikipedia article

FilersVsPilersForbes

FilersVsPilersEconomist

Jones2011

Some valuable readings can be found at the above URLs. These were all obtained (except the Wikipedia article) by googling the expression pilers-vs-filers and appeared in the first three pages of results.

Note that each of these readings has a different form of credibility, to be discussed in a later section of the course. When you use a search engine to discover information about a topic, you must be sensitive to issues related to the search engine and to the information sources linked. Here, I will just give a brief blurb about each source.

Forbes was a US magazine for decades before it created an online presence. It cultivates an image as a maverick business publication, espousing values favoring considerable social and economic freedom for individuals, i.e., libertarianism, and a blunt style, connecting business success to individuals rather than organizations.

The Economist is a conservative British weekly magazine. A policy advisor to US President Clinton once told me that The Economist is the most widely read publicly available weekly publication among presidents and prime ministers of nations worldwide.

The Google Books result is a page from a book called Personal Information Management, edited by William P Jones and Jaime Teevan. This book is a collection of chapters by scholars who write about information systems. This book introduces the mainstream academic thinking about personal information management. It introduces what scholars who do studies about personal information management have concluded over the past thirty years of study.

Wikipedia does a great job on PIM!

Wikipedia documents the following

Senses of personal information

Personality, mood, and emotion

Related activities and areas

Six senses of personal

Owned by me
About me
Directed toward me
Sent / posted by me
Experienced by me
Relevant to me

Personality, mood, and emotion

Studies are divided on whether personality predicts personal information management

Operating system is argued by one study as more predictive

Personal information management affects mood and is affected by it

Anxiety is typically expressed with respect to PIM

Personal knowledge management

Hacker News has repeatedly visited the issue of personal knowledge management (PKM) with discussions of advice on how to accomplish it. It is instructive to read several of these discussions to see what changes and what remains the same over time.

Many posts prescribe particular software packages for PKM. Others suggest practices the authors find useful, such as using the filesystem to organize artifacts. Alarmingly, some authors claim to have practiced their preferred method for as little as a few days! Consequently, it is harder to view these as prescriptions as much as they are viewpoints.

One major issue raised by many of these posters is the problem of link rot. Saving bookmarks to websites may be less effective than copying the entire website.

Bloat can be a severe problem as one poster claims to have a OneNote file of over 8GB that can no longer be synchronized and can not be easily exported. The OneNote user also touches on the problem that proprietary formats bring lock-in. The problem of lock-in may not be apparent until a large investment of time and energy has been made that would be expensive to replicate.

One credible suggestion is to submit bookmarks to public archive sites to overcome link rot and take advantage of distributed storage as well as to avoid proprietary formats and participate in creating a public good. Distributing storage to the web may reduce bloat but also reduces privacy and increases reliance on an uninterrupted network connection.

Example: nb

nb is on github

Described there as “a command line and local web note‑taking, bookmarking, archiving, and knowledge base application”

Discussed on Hacker News yesterday

Features: open source, plain text data storage, encryption, filtering, pinning, tagging, search, Git-backed versioning and syncing, Pandoc-based conversion, wiki-style linking, terminal and gui web browing, inline images, todos with tasks, notebooks, folders, color themes, plugins

Example: nb (continued)

May need smartphone companion (or may be able to use existing smartphone apps, such as Working Copy or Box)

Not yet widely discussed on Hacker News (at least in comparison to Notion and Obsidian)

Is popularity important?

Is maintenance important?

Exercise: PKM investigation

Divide into pairs.
Identify an online discussion of PKM.
Find the most popular examples of PKM.
Post the list to a google doc created by me.
Investigate them and report to the class, unless your list conflicts with someone else’s, in which case, choose different PKMs.

Personal Information Curation

Whittaker (2011)

This review of prior research in information science addresses the paucity of work on curation as opposed to consumption.

Whittaker asserts that people seek new information, but that information science is largely silent on what they then do with it.

Whittaker describes a few studies showing that people spend an inordinate amount of time and energy curating personal information.

Whittaker (2011) (continued)

Personal information considered includes documents, email, photos, and web pages.

Many people spend a long time managing it, even though they rarely exploit it.

The curation lifecycle proposed consists of keeping, managing, and exploiting personal information.

Exploitation is conducted via search or navigation, usually navigation.

Exploitation depends, in part, on information uniqueness and the spectrum from informative vs action-oriented items.

END

References

Whittaker, Steve. 2011. “Personal Information Management: From Information Consumption to Curation.” In Annual Review of Information Science and Technology ARIST, edited by Blaise Cronin, 45:1–42. Medford, NJ: Information Today, Inc.

Colophon

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