Once Found, What Then?: A Study of "Keeping" Behaviors in the Personal Use of Web Information

1. Once Found, What Then?:  A Study of "Keeping" Behaviors in the Personal Use of Web Information William Jones, Harry Bruce The Information SchoolUniversity of Washington Susan Dumais Microsoft Research

2. The Problem • Finding things is a well-studied problem. • Keeping things found is not so well-studied but arises in many domains: • Everyday objects in our lives • Personal files – paper and electronic • Email • The Web

3. Related Work • Organizing personal files • Files & “piles”, (Malone, 1983) • Location memory is limited, (Jones & Dumais, 1986) • Preference for browsing, (Barreau & Nardi, 1995); but see Fertig, Freeman & Gelernter (1996) for a rebuttal. • Organizing email • Similar use patterns, similar problems as for personal files, (Whittaker & Sidner, 1996)

4. Related Work (cont.) • Organizing the Web • Widespread use of “Bookmarks”, (Pitkow & Kehoe, 1996) • Steady increase in number with time, (Abrams Baecker & Chignell, 1998) • Increasing use of folders, (Abrams et al., 1998) • Frequent use of “Back” button within a session; infrequent use of “History”, (Tauscher & Greenberg, 1997)

5. Overall Research Objectives We’re looking for answers to the following questions: • How do people manage information for re-access and re-use? How do people “keep found things found”? • What problems do people encounter? • What can be done to help?

6. Our Initial Focus: The Web

7. The Research Plan • Study 1: Observe “keeping” activities as participants complete work-related, web-intensive tasks in their workplace. • Completed. 24 participants in all. • Study 2: Observe efforts to “re-find” web information for a subset of these same participants. • Ongoing. 13 participants in all; 9 have completed. • Analyze video recordings of Study 1 and Study 2. • Survey a larger group. • Initiated. • Prototype selectively.

8. Study 1: The Participants • 6 Researchers. • 9 Information professionals -- including librarians and corporate information specialists. • 9 Managers.

9. Participants … may approach web information differently: • Researchers – have “direct contact” with information. • Information professionals – are mediators. • Managers – receive filtered information from colleagues, subordinates, their boss, etc.

10. Study 1: The Procedure • Prior to the observation • Participants completed an email questionnaire… • and listed at least three work-related, web-intensive “free-time” tasks. • One task was selected for the observation. • During the observation • Participants were observed in their own workplace. • Sessions lasted about an hour. • An “over-the-shoulder” video recording was made of participants as they “thought-aloud” while working on the task. • Participants handled office interruptions (phone calls, visitors, etc.) as they normally would.

11. Study 1: The Results Many “keeping” methods were observed: • Send email to self. • Send email to others. • Print out the web page. • Save the web page as a file. • Paste URL into a document. • Add hyperlink to a web site. • Do nothing (and enter URL directly later, search for or access from another web site). • Bookmark the page. • Write down the URL on paper.

12. A Functional Analysis Several functions appear to influence the choice of method: • Reminding • Context • Portability of information • Number of access points • Ease of access

13. A Functional Analysis (cont.) Additional functions: • Persistence of information • Preservation of information in its current state • Currency of information • Ease of integration • Communication and information sharing • Ease of maintenance

14. A Functional Analysis (cont.)

15. A Functional Analysis (cont.)

16. A Functional Analysis (cont.)

17. A Functional Analysis (cont.)

18. Other Notables • Participants seemed to distinguish between three categories. • Web sites used repeatedly – make it easy to access. • Web sites used infrequently but important to be able to access. • Web sites to check out later to see if useful. • Participants distinguished in different ways.

19. Other Notables (cont.) • Some participants went to great lengths to maintain a single hierarchy. • Print web pages to file with other papers. • Save email documents to filing system for e-docs. • Work with assistant to establish consistent organizations across paper documents, e-docs, email & favorites. • Keeping practices appear to vary with a person’s job and relationship to information.

20. Study 2: Delayed Cued Recall • A second study looks at how/how well people are able to get back to web sites. • Session 1: Participant describes each in a set of web sites they have visited recently – without including name or URL. • Session 2, 3-6 months later: Participants are cued with these descriptions and told to get back to the site as best they can. We observe methods used and problems encountered.

21. Study 2: Results So Far… • Success rate is high – 142 out of 151 trials or 94% • The site is usually located using the method first attempted -- 123 out of 142 trials or 87% of the time. • The most common of these “first methods” were: • Direct entry of a URL – 51 of 123 trials or 41% • Favorites – 32 of 123 trials or 26% • Web search – 29 of 123 trials or 24% • Following a hyper link from another web site – 23 of 123 trials or 19%

22. Prototyping … as driven by the data. Simple extensions to Add Favorites to support the following options: • Add a comment. • Save Favorite to filing system. • Email Favorite.

23. The Prototype

24. Conclusions • People use a diversity of methods to organize web information for re-access and re-use. • A functional analysis can help us to understand the diversity of methods observed and their relative popularity.

25. Conclusions (cont.) • Methods differ in the functions they provide. • No single current method provides all the functions a user may need. • The relative importance of functions (and hence the choice of methods) depends upon the task at hand.

26. Conclusions (cont.) • A “natural” study of people doing tasks in their workplace can be very useful.

27. Observations and speculations • Participants appear to be effective at returning to a site. Success rate is high and the first method chosen usually works. • Direct entry, search and “hyperlink to” account for 83% of successful first-try methods for re-access. These methods require no keeping activity up front. • Does this reflect a trend? Will improved finding tools eliminate the need for keeping activities? • But… participants sometimes searched in several different “places” before finding a web site (or sometimes giving up).

28. Next Steps • Complete our analysis of video data. • Continue to collect survey data. • Extend and validate the functional analysis. • Broaden our exploration to look at how people manage information across organizational schemes.

29. For More Information • http://kftf.ischool.washington.edu/

30. Use of keeping methods by participant group