A study of a crosstool information usage on personal computers : how users mentally link information relating to a task but residing in different applications and how importance and type of acquisition affect this.

摘要

Our information space is partitioned between real and digital worlds. Information in a digital world is fragmented between several devices such us mobile phones, handheld devices, netbooks, notebooks and personal computers. Even on each device information is fragmented because of several information formats or types (files, emails, web bookmarks. etc.) and applications. To some extent we already understand how we manage documents in the real world, mobile devices and software applications. But we have yet to understand how information between applications, devices and the real world is connected and how we cope with the burden of memorizing connections while we constantly create new ones. This research emphasized information management on personal computers. Our aim was to find out how much information users consider important in three main hierarchy based structures (files, emails and web bookmarks), how information between hierarchies (and applications) is mentally linked and managed according to tasks, how long it is regarded as important and if this information receives any special treatment. An online questionnaire was developed and participants were invited to daily enter the data about information they considered important and to link that information to other information where they thought the link is necessary. The results showed that participants regarded their information as important but the time this information was considered important was short. It also showed that more created information was regarded as important than received or found, that information was mentally linked in the same hierarchy as well as across hierarchies or tools and also that information can be part of several task information collections or that collections overlap. Although this study showed clear evidence that users do mentally link their information, it also raised several question like how links are maintained, how they relate to tasks and how they change over time.