“Finding and reminding” reconsidered

Abstract

In the July 1995 SIGCHI Bulletin, Deborah Barreau and Bonnie 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 electronic 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/computer 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 reminding function; 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 fundamental 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 studies 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 interaction over others. In this light, the reported patterns are unsurprising 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 stereo owners of the 1950s and concluding that there was "a lack of importance" of high-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 current practice but other possibilities. In this article we comment briefly on Barreau and Nardi's analysis, pointing out where and why we think they have drawn the wrong conclusions. We then mention a few systems that use different non-desktop interaction metaphors that should be included in future studies of this type.