An empirical study of personal document spaces

Abstract

The way people use computers has changed in recent years, from desktop single-machine settings to many computers and personal assistants in widely different contexts. Personal Document Spaces (PDSs) now tend to span several machines or locii. Moreover, the types and numbers of documents users manipulate have also grown. The advent of pervasive computing will reinforce this trend. In order to develop new approaches to help users manage their PDSs, we must have an idea of what documents they contain are and how these are organized across several locii. We performed an empirical study where the PDSs of eleven users were analyzed in depth, allowing us to extract a thorough characterization of those PDSs, both in terms of structure and contents. With these results in mind, we suggest several guidelines for the development of user interfaces. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2003.