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Maybe some of you heard about this earlier, but it was new to me: today Microsoft unveiled “Microsoft Surface“, a multi-touch tabletop display. There’s a video on Popular Mechanics of showing what the device can actually do, as opposed to the Microsoft videos, which talk about the “dawn of a new era”, and feature actors with that look of amazement-shock-and-pure-joy that can be found on the back of a Jenga box.

The current price is around $5-10k, so it’s not quite a consumer-level device yet. On the other hand, the IBM PC was the equivalent of $5000 in its time, so it might not be long before we are all amazed, shocked, and infused with pure joy on a daily basis.

One of the interesting things about ubiquitous computing is the major disconnect between the ubicomp devices (cell phones, interactive displays, etc.) and traditional desktop computers. Like, the demo where you drop the camera onto the display and the pictures come shooting out is great and all, but what happens when you want to look at photos that are stored on your desktop computer? Imagine how fun it will be to try to connect to your Windows 98 machine with your Microsoft Surface, fat-fingering through Windows Explorer. Better get out the dialing wand.

I’ve been reading “Beyond the Desktop Metaphor: Designing Integrated Digital Work Environments“. The title is pretty self-explanatory I think. The book touches on some interesting projects in the PIM space, such as Lifestreams and Haystack. In the final chapter, they talk about the idea of the “personal information cloud”. More and more of the information that we interact with is on the network, and this doesn’t fit very well into the traditional desktop metaphor, where things have the illusion of having a “physical location” (in a specific folder, or on the desktop, etc.):

As users disperse and “destructure” their personal information, there is less need for the desktop/office metaphor to be the organizer of the information. We believe that the metaphor is being replaced by more abstract and sophisticated organizers, based on over a decade of experience by millions of people with information technology. Thus let us use the term Personal Information Cloud to refer to the “working set” of information that is relevant to the individual and his work.

This sort of concept is almost exactly what I’ve been thinking about for a while. When you have an idea, it’s nice to see that other people are thinking the same way. Especially when it’s really, really smart people. At the same time, it’s a little disappointing to realize that you’re not as original as you think. You know?

Anyways, they go on to list several requirements for this concept of a personal information cloud to be useful:

1. Personal. It should contain most if not all information that is relevant to the individual and his activities.
2. Persistent. It should be preserved.
3. Pervasive. It should be always accessible from a variety of devices, programs, and services, i.e., it “follows the individual”.
4. Secure. The information should be secure and private at an appropriate level. This is a significant issue when information is not held locally (although having information locally is not in itself assurance of privacy in a networked world).
5. Referenceable. Each information object in the cloud should ideally have a unique ID (or permalink) and support a protocol for retrieval.
6. Standardized. The information needs to be in standard formats to that it is usable by a variety of devices, programs, and services.
7. Semantic. The cloud should be based on an extensible scheme of semantically rich metadata, so that it can be understood by a variety of programs and services in different contexts.

I’ve actually got all of these points scrawled down somewhere in my notebook. I think the ideas of persistence, pervasiveness, and referenceability are especially important, because that’s where most existing PIM solutions are lacking. Most PIM software is intended to be used on a single machine, which is obviously bad for pervasiveness and persistence. And web applications like GMail, although they are pervasive, can’t really be depended on to be persistent. Does Google guarantee that they will never delete my email? What happens if I want to move to a different provider? What if Mountain View sinks into the Pacific Ocean? And finally, referenceability is especially missing from most PIM software. Just like every web page has a URL, imagine if every piece of your personal information did too. As Hans Reiser would tell you, this greatly increases the expressive power of the information system.

See also: Aza Raskin’s Death of the Desktop presentation

I just finished reading “The Psychology of Personal Information Management“, written by Mark Lansdale in 1988. I love reading old papers like this, because they are either comically inaccurate, like the 1950s Popular Science predictions (”in the year 2000, everyone will have a personal robot butler”), or else shockingly prescient (e.g. Vannevar Bush’s “As We May Think“, which basically predicted the web and digital cameras).

In the paper, Lansdale makes an interesting comment about the use of real-world metaphors in designing user interfaces. Many interfaces have been inspired by observing people’s behaviours in the real world: “Hmmm, people organize paper documents into folders, so they must want to do the same for digital documents!” Lansdale makes the point that we must try to understand the psychological reasons behind the action, because the action may be a coping strategy rather than an actual need. In other words, people may only use a strategy because of the limitations of the technology — just because something is done with paper documents doesn’t mean people want to do it with digital documents.

No one would suggest the introduction of unstructured `piles’ of documents in a computer environment. (I say this with the thought that somewhere someone probably has, much in the way that someone thought of building planes that flapped their wings.)

This is pretty funny in retrospect, because several people have actually done this. Not to judge those efforts; I just liked Lansdale’s metaphor, and generally agree with his point that real-world metaphors are not necessarily desirable.

Incidentally, I loved this quote from the Register’s article on piles:

Although haemorrhoids give millions of sufferers discomfiture every day, Apple’s “piles” are an intriguing concept which should ease the pain of using such a constipated file and folder UI metaphor.

I started at U of T this week, and I’m trying to narrow down my thesis topic, so I’m basically doing a swan dive into a pile of papers related to personal information management. Today I’ve read a couple interesting ones about how we use keyword search, and why even the most perfect search engine probably won’t ever replace the use of browsing to find information.

In the first paper, Don’t Take My Folders Away!, the researchers surveyed a small group of people to see how they used folders to organize the files on their computer. When the users were asked why they created folders, the answer was generally “to get back my files”. But when they were asked if they would give up their folders and find their information exclusively using a search engine, the answer was a resounding “no”. The conclusion of the paper was that folders are not just a way to organize information — the folder structure itself actually contains information about a project. For example, a folder structure can indicate subprojects and subtasks of a project.

The second paper, “The Perfect Search Is Not Enough“, investigated how people performed searches both on the web and in their personal information. They found that people rarely searched for the specific item they were looking for; instead, they moved in small, local steps, using context to guide them. For example, rather than directly searching for a professor’s phone number (using a query like “david karger phone number”), they would search for the professor’s web page (maybe even by looking it up in a staff directory) and then try to find the information that way. The authors referred to this concept as “orienteering”:

Orienteering involves using both prior and contextual information to narrow in on the actual information need, often in a series of steps, without specifying the entire information need up front

Together, I think these papers demonstrate that while search is a useful way to find information, most people still need to use some kind of browsing to find the information they are looking for. The orienteering paper suggested that this kind of approach lessens the cognitive burden on the user. I think it really makes sense if you think of a real-life metaphor: you know how to find your way to a certain pub, but you don’t know the address and couldn’t give precise instructions about how to get there. Humans are naturally good at this kind of incremental way-finding, and browsing is a good way to take advantage of that.

(Photo by AlbeJTD on Flickr)