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Summarization and Personal Information Management. Carolyn Penstein Ros é Language Technologies Institute/ Human-Computer Interaction Institute. “This is personal information, not necessarily in the sense that it is private, but that we have it for our own use. We own it, and would
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Summarization and Personal Information Management Carolyn Penstein Rosé Language Technologies Institute/ Human-Computer Interaction Institute
“This is personal information, not necessarily in the sense that it is private, but that we have it for our own use. We own it, and would feel deprived if it were taken away.”
“It is not surprising that concepts of the ‘paperless office’ are as far off as they were when the idea was first mooted.”
Announcements • Questions? • Plan for Today • Focus on Cognition: Landsdale paper
Landsdale Paper • “This paper illustrates how many of the issues involved in the automation of information management are essentially psychological in nature.” • Recall, recognition, categorization • The important point is the connection between psychology and design, not what is described about the “state-of-the-art”, which is of course out of date by now
Interaction between the problem and human behavior Problem Human Behavior Environment Human Cognition Solution Design Technology Today’s focus Problem?
Nice quote from last time! • As some people have already mentioned, these conclusions were reached in 1988, and it took us almost 20 years to exploit them in a modern operating system: OS X's Spotlight, as well as Google Desktop Search address the problem of not remembering filenames, by allowing people to quickly search through file contents.
“Another general remark worth making is that the history of technological development is littered with products that failed, not because of economic reasons, but because nobody really wanted the functionality they provided … technology capability is outstripping a good understanding of what people want.”
Taking a Step Back… • Methodology: How should we study the problem of information overload? • What is the role of theory from psychology? • What is the role of ethnographic observation? • What methodological standards should we observe? • Why is studying this problem tricky? • Design Process: What is the connection between psychology and design?
Student Quote • A very important, and I think under-appreciated point in many of today's search engines, is that the process of dealing with information itself changes how we approach the task of locating and digesting more information.
“No one would suggest the introduction of unstructured piles of documents in an computer environment.”
How we find things… What categories should we use? How do we remember them? How do we use the information we do remember?
Memory Challenge:What does chess tell us about design principles for information management systems?
“For the purposes of information management, this implies that the process of filing a document should be a well-defined event in which the choices made fall into a clear pattern of organization, which the person understands well…”
What is Usability? • Learnability: users should be able to get started quickly using the system productively • Efficiency: Once the user has learned to use the system, productivity should be high • Memorability: Coming back to the system after not using it for a long time should not require relearning • Error Prevention: Interface design should prevent errors and/or make recovering from errors easy • Satisfaction: Users should feel good about using the system
Nielson’s Rules of Thumb • Simplicity • Speak the user’s language • Minimize cognitive load • Consistency • Feedback • Clearly marked exits • Shortcuts • Good error messages • Prevent errors • Help and Documentation
Hostile Information Management? You ask for something by name, if your secretary finds it, she gives it to you or says she can’t find it, doesn’t tell you if there is something similar… If a secretary put such a barrier between you and your filing system, it would be regarded as hostile behavior.
Critiquehttp://www.cabinetng.com/solutions/electronic-document-management.phpCritiquehttp://www.cabinetng.com/solutions/electronic-document-management.php
Student Quote • The problem of ineffecient categorization and failure in retrieving the correct label is still present in current information systems like search engines, local search repositories, file systems etc. Email is an example of a widely used information system which still suffers from the above mentioned problems.
Opposing Student Quote? • I think classification is surely a problem but today's systems have high performance searching features which can dig out a document using a varied number of attributes. Mailing systems also provide the option of assigning lables (and multiple labels too) to mails which has made retrieval task way easier. A point of concern is that one can't store large documents (not usually larger than 20MB) in these mails and the total storage capacity is also limited
Student Critique of Google • 1) A small amount of title text and a small snippet of text extracted from the page provide only a glimmer of information about the actual content of a page. The context of that information, or that entire document, in the larger scheme of the categories that the text or document belong to are lost. This can lead to increasing levels of frustration as a user (such as myself) has to manually build a "mental map" of the search results to identify what my search is telling me, whether it is relevant, and what I need to do to change my search strategy.
Student Critique of Google • 2) Click-through popularity, linking popularity and a number of other "social-like" algorithms tend to deliver the popular results rather than the results I need. Sometimes, I don't want to know the same thing everyone else wants to know.
Student Critique of Google • 3) I often need to break up a search for detailed information over the course of days, weeks or even months for particularly large research questions. There is no efficient way to mine the information contained in a search engine over a period greater than a single search session. Offline note-taking and bookmarks are a stop-gap measure to help get it done, but there is no functionality to enable "deep" research.
