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

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

Related Work Organizing personal files Organizing email 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)

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)

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?

Our Initial Focus: The Web

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.

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

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.

Study 1: The Procedure Prior to the observation During 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.

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.

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

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

A Functional Analysis (cont.)

A Functional Analysis (cont.)

A Functional Analysis (cont.)

A Functional Analysis (cont.)

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.

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.

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.

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%

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.

The Prototype

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.

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.

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

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).

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.

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

Use of keeping methods by participant group