"Finding and Reminding" Reconsidered
Scott Fertig, Eric Freeman and David Gelernter
In the July 1995 SIGCHI Bulletin, Deborah Barreau and Bon-
nie Nardi rightly point out that "every computer user spends
enormous time and effort in filing and finding of electronic files,
yet there has been very little research on the subject." To this
end, Barreau and Nardi have investigated lectronic filing and
finding practices of the users of common desktop systems to
determine "the factors affecting individual decisions to acquire,
organize, maintain, and retrieve information." While we
applaud their efforts to study the most basic aspects of user/com-
puter interaction, we believe they draw the wrong conclusions
from their own research. Our goal in this paper is to explain why.
From two studies, with a total of 22 subjects (four DOS users,
one Windows 3.1 user, one OS/2 user and 16 Macintosh users),
they noted the following similarities among all the users:
1. A preference for location-based search for finding files (in
contrast to logical, text-based search);
2. The use of file placement as a critical rernindingfienction;
3. The use of three types of information: ephemeral, working
and archived;
4. The "lack of importance" of archiving files;
and further conclude that these similarities represent funda-
mental user practices and preferences that are independent of
operating system and level of experience.
We believe that conclusion three gives us a useful categorization
of the user's information space and previous tudies have
reported consistent findings \[6\]. Conclusions one, two and four
however, are artifacts of the narrow scope of the systems studied
rather than general statements of the way users acquire, organize,
maintain and retrieve information. Both studies focus on the
common desktop metaphor which favors certain types of inter-
action over others. In this light, the reported patterns are unsur-
prising because the user interfaces for the Macintosh, Windows
and OS/2 platforms are close relatives. 1 We believe we are doing
more than commenting on three minor points of their work;
rather we are suggesting a more fundamental problem with their
analysis that is analogous to concluding that radio listeners of the
1920s preferred headphones for listening, despite the fact that
radios with speakers had not yet been invented. Or studying ste-
reo owners of the 1950s and concluding that there was "a lack of
importance" ofhigh-fidelity systems because the vast majority of
people listened to poor-fidelity record players. Today, we know
that people prefer high-fidelity. We believe future research
should broaden the scope of analysis and consider not just cur-
rent practice but other possibilities.
In this article we comment briefly on Barreau and Nardi's analy-
sis, pointing out where and why we think they have drawn the
wrong conclusions. We then mention afew systems that use dif-
ferent non-desktop interaction metaphors that should be
included in future studies of this type.
Analysis
Preference for Location-based Search
Barreau and Nardi describe location-based search as the process
whereby auser "takes a guess at the directory;folder o diskette
where she thinks a file might be located, goes to that location,
and then browses the list of files or array of icons in the location
till she finds the file she's looking for. The process is iterated as
needed." The alternative, as described by Barreau and Nardi, is
1. The legal wrangling over "look and feel" reflects this fact.
66 January 1996 Volume 28, Number 1 SIGCHI Bulletin

logical finding, where a text-based search ofkeywords and filena-
mes is used to search for files. This functionality was provided by
the Macintosh "Find" and DOS "whereis" utilities in their stud-
ies.
Barreau and Nardi conclude that users prefer to find files by
using location-based cues over text-based search approaches.
They hypothesize that users may prefer location-based searching
because it "more actively engages the mind and body and
imparts a greater sense of control." They further hypothesize
that users dislike text-based search because they have to "\[sit\]
there waiting for the computer to return a list of files that may
or may not be relevant." Barreau and Nardi also found that file-
names were used for the purpose of"jogging the memory" rather
than for the purpose of search. However, they report hat if users
could not find a filc within a couple of tries they then turned to
the "find" feature to search for it.
First, note that location-based finding is nothing more than a
user controlled "logical search." In location-based finding the
user searches the file collection relying on mnemonic aids and
memory of past events to locate a file. This scheme is not with-
out faults; it can be error prone and time consuming. Barreau
and Nardi pointed out in their own study that a user could not
find a file that had been created a mere several hours earlier and
remarked, "What did I call that file?"
It is entirely possible that their subjects preferred location-based
search because it was the lesser of evils: if other search methods
are slow, difficult, or only operate on file names (not contents)
then location-based search may not seem so bad. Moreover,
"whereis" and "Find" are hardly state of the art in logical search.
More recent systems provide incremental indexing of file con-
tents and significantly reduce search time while increasing accu-
racy \[7\], \[4\]. Inclusion of these better search techniques into
current systems could sway results toward logical search.
We don't argue that screen layout and organization based on
conceptual locations isn't useful. In many cases it can help the
user maintain a sense of context about the workspace. We do
argue that using virtual ocation as a basis for organizing infor-
mation and personal document collections i often as hit-or-miss
as a logical search mechanism. Location-based search has many
problems: How do we maintain file collections over long periods
of time? How well does it work when more than one user is
involved? The way information is used changes over time - how
well does the location-based scheme handle this? What about
scalability? We believe that location-based search is only possible
when users don't archive, or give up using archived information.
If archiving is unsupported or difficult then other search mech-
anisms become less important and relying on short-term cues,
such as location, is possible. Barreau and Nardi have dismissed
archiving, questioning the "supposed coming information over-
load." By contrast, we have no doubt the problem is alreadyhere.
We examine archiving further below.
Reminding
Malone \[6\] was one of the first to point out the importance of
reminding in our paper-based systems and suggests their inclu-
sion in computer-based systems. Yet today, software systems pro-
vide little support for reminding. While a number of time
management, scheduling, and "to do" list applications have
come to market, they don't represent an integrated effort in pro-
viding users with this basic capability.
Barreau and Nardi observed that computer users often use a file's
location as a critical reminding function. For instance, at the end
of the day a Macintosh user may leave files on the desktop as a
reminder of work to be done the next morning. Other users left
electronic mail messages in their in-box to remind them of meet-
ings. Like Batreau and Nardi, we believe reminding is an impor-
tant capability that software systems hould support. Unlike
Barreau and Nardi, we find the use of location-based storage an
unsatisfying, easily undermined method of creating reminders.
Moreover, we see the use of location for reminding as a simple
coping strategy for lack of anything better. The desktop meta-
phor has no semantic notion of location-based reminding, and,
as the authors point out, this reminding technique amounts to a
"behavioral trigger" that reminds users to take some action when
they observe files in certain locations. In summary, location-
based reminding amounts to an ad hoc user convention and its
problems are obvious: there is no way to insure that a reminder
actually reminds you; lack of sufficient screen real estate; inappli-
cability to long-term tasks; bad fit to collaborative work, etc.
Archiving
Barreau and Nardi claim that "old information is generally not
useful" and so there is a "lack of importance of archiving files."
While we concede that over time, old information isgenerally less
likely to be valuable, situations occur when old information is
essential. We can all recall times when we needed information we
threw away a week, a month or a year ago. In fact, Cook's work
\[1\] has shown that archiving information can be critical in an
organizational setting.
Barreau and Nardi found that users in their studies did not
archive or rely on archived information. Once again we believe
these findings are artifacts. Consider the "cart before the horse"
explanation - that is, ifarchiving information is so difficult that
it deters users from archiving (and this is what Barreau and Nardi
have observed), then users obviously will not depend on archived
information. This leads us to wonder how users would use old
information if it were convenient to store and access. If software
systems handled archiving and retrieval more conveniently we
might find that old information is reused more often. The
underlying problem is that location-based storage and archiving
are conflicting oals. Location-based storage assumes a small
information collection (basically what the user can remember)
and does not scale to large collections of information. But infor-
mation is not always needed in the same way (and thus, not in
the same location) it was originally. Archived information is
often needed in a context hat is different from the one in which
it was created, and in a different location.
The desktop and file&folder metaphor were created so that users
could relate their computer-based systems to the paper-based
systems they were used to. Yet paper-based systems are first and
foremost archiving systems. They accommodate ephemeral nd
working information but the state of the art in both these areas
still seems to be a messy desktop.
SIGCHI Bulletin Volume 28, Number 1 January 1996 67