Doing Today’s Job with Yesterday’s Tools

An article I wrote called Doing Today’s Job with Yesterday’s Tools is up at Boxes and Arrows. Here’s the summary:

Where is the software that can help us cope with the massive amounts of information that we deal with on a daily basis? Patrick Dubroy points out the usability problems with current personal information management techniques, and makes some suggestions about how to improve the situation.

I wrote the article to help myself clarify my thoughts on the subject of information management. I doesn’t go into much technical detail; it’s more of a 10,000-foot view of the problem. Please check it out, Digg/Del.icio.us/link it, and by all means, leave a comment or email me if you have any thoughts.

What happens to our information when we die?

There’s a good article on UXmatters about the increasing difficulty of keeping a handle on all our digital information. I’ve mostly thought about this as a short term, immediate problem: how can I make my life easier now? But of course, there is also the question of how we are going to manage all this information going forward. Are we going to be able to access photos and email that are 20 years old?

Luckily, I think the two points of view (immediate vs. long-term) are basically the same problem. If we can make it easier to navigate, manipulate, and share our information now, then it will be easier to access in the future. Again, it basically comes back to the core ideas of the semantic web (from the W3C):

The Semantic Web is about two things. It is about common formats for integration and combination of data drawn from diverse sources, where on the original Web mainly concentrated on the interchange of documents. It is also about language for recording how the data relates to real world objects. That allows a person, or a machine, to start off in one database, and then move through an unending set of databases which are connected not by wires but by being about the same thing.

For the longest time, I saw this as being a separate problem from personal information management. But our personal information is increasingly becoming part of the web, and I see now that it’s really all the same problem.

Blake Ross takes on information management

I just ran across this article that talks about what Blake Ross (one of the Firefox guys) is up to next. It actually sounds similar to some of the ideas I have been playing around with:

“Right now, people want to shuffle around content,” he says, “but the world’s fused together by a collection of hacks.” Something that should be simple, say, getting photos from a digital camera onto the Web, is a Sisyphean task for most people. “Step back and ask, ‘What’s wrong with this picture?’” Ross says.

The article describes his new project, Parakey. It seems to be an easier way to share information online — a kind of web OS that will be seamlessly linked to your desktop. There is a client the runs on your machine, and it keeps track of all kinds of information: photos, emails, etc. You can access the information through a web interface, and easily share it with other people. At least that’s the impression I get.

This touches on one of my main complaints about the current software world: we have all these specialized applications for dealing with different kinds of information, with incompatible data models and inconsistent features. It sounds like Parakey is taking the “one app to rule them all” approach, and I think any solution that requires people to switch away from Flickr, Gmail, and MySpace to some other half-baked equivalents is not going to be successful. I hope I’m wrong about Parakey though.

In the next few weeks, I’ll be posting an article that’s a bit more clear about my ideas: what I think is broken about today’s software, and how I think we might fix it.

Yahoo! Pipes: Plumbing for the semantic web

One of the cooler things I’ve seen in a while: Tim O’Reilly writes about Yahoo! Pipes, a new service that’s like Unix pipes for the web. In Tim’s words:

It’s a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output.

Like I said in my comment yesterday, I think that once we get over the hype of Web 2.0, people are going to be looking for better ways to hook all this stuff together. Nobody wants to maintain dozens of accounts just to keep track of all their data. Being able to connect all these sites intelligently is basically what the semantic web is all about, and Yahoo! Pipes looks to be a significant step towards making the semantic web comprehensible and usable by regular people.

Personal Information Management: A change is gonna come

For a long time now, I’ve been frustrated by how hard it is to organize and manage all the little bits of digital data in my life. I have files stored on several different computers; bookmarks in Firefox and Del.icio.us; photos on my website, on Flickr, in iPhoto, and in Picasa. Finding the information is just one of the problems. What if my hard drive dies (knock wood)? And will I be able to deal with this stuff in 10 or 15 years?

For these practical (and selfish) reasons, I’m really interested in the area of information management. In fact, it’s the area I’d like to focus on when I do my master’s in HCI this fall. As I learned more about the field of HCI, I found it a little surprising that very few people seemed to be working on this problem. I mean, it seems almost too obvious that people are finding it harder and harder to cope with the vast amounts of information in their lives. But lately, I’ve started seeing lots of interesting activity in this area.

The problem is fundamentally interdisciplinary, so it’s good to see that there is interesting research being done in many different fields, like computer science, psychology, cognitive science, and information studies. Within the “traditional” domains of computer science, there is work being done in the areas of databases and artificial intelligence. The SEMEX project, from the University of Washington’s Database Research Group, is looking at system for efficiently storing, managing, and retrieving personal information. Another interesting project out of UW, from the Information School, is Keeping Found Things Found.

Both cognitive science and artificial intelligence are concerned with knowledge representation, with cog sci focusing on how people store and retrieve information, and AI focusing on how to store information to create machines that think. This knowledge representation angle is the way that I’ve been coming at the problem. How can we structure the information in a way that reflects and supports the way people think? MIT’s Haystack Project is doing some cool stuff in this area: “investigating approaches designed to let people manage their information in ways that make the most sense to them.”

Along the same lines, I saw a really cool book that is coming out soon about information foraging theory. According to Jakob Neilsen:

Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research since 1993. Developed at the Palo Alto Research Center (previously Xerox PARC) by Stuart Card, Peter Pirolli, and colleagues, information foraging uses the analogy of wild animals gathering food to analyze how humans collect information online.

It seems like most of the research that is being done into how people interact with information is focused on the web. That’s the main focus of the field of information architecture. Peter Morville is one of the gurus there; he literally wrote the book on information architecture. But I really think that a lot of the idea about web-based information can also be applied to personal information.

Anyhow, it looks like things are shaping up to get better — more and more people are researching the problems of personal information management. And more than likely, I will soon be one of those people.

(Photo by theCallowQueen on Flickr)

Silos and Architecture Astronauts

Joel Spolsky’s latest post is about what went wrong with the Chandler project. I’ve been eagerly awaiting Chandler since I first heard about the project, but I began to lose interest when, after several years of development, they didn’t even have a useful prototype. After reading an account of the project in the book Dreaming in Code, Joel concludes that the problem was that “the vision was too grand and the details were a little short.”

The only concrete design ideas, as far as I could tell from Rosenberg’s book, were “peer-to-peer,” “no silos,” and “natural language date interpretation.” This may be the a limitation of the book, but the initial design sure seemed to be extremely vague.

This idea of “no silos” is one that really hits home for me. It’s something that’s bugged me for years about information management software. We have all these bits of information — emails, text files, Word documents, bookmarks, etc. — and we have all these specialized applications for managing them. I’m not arguing against specialized applications, but it’s frustrating when there are completely different conventions for each type of data. I can use tags to organize emails and bookmarks, but not regular files. If I want to send a photo to someone, I attach it to an email, but if I want to send an email, then I don’t “attach”, I “forward”. It’s not hard to imagine how confusing this might be for some people.

That’s what I think of when I hear “no silos”. And given what I know about the Chandler project, I think that’s what they mean too. Joel came to a totally different conclusion, a strawman which he easily knocks down:

As soon as you start asking questions about “No Silos,” you realize it’s not going to work. Do you put your email on the calendar? Where? On the day when it arrived? So now I have 200 Viagra ads on Friday obscuring the one really important shareholder meeting?

I seriously doubt that anyone ever proposed putting every email that you receive into your calendar. Anyways, Joel uses this example to pull out his favourite whipping boy, the “architecture astronaut”:

I think the idea of “No Silos” is most appealing to architecture astronauts, the people who look at subclasses and see abstract base classes, and who love to move functionality from the subclass into the base class for no good reason other than architectural aesthetics.

Personally, I agree that you shouldn’t waste time designing for things that you may never need. I believe in writing the simplest thing that could possibly work and then making iterative upgrades. But I don’t think Joel is being fair here, since he obviously doesn’t understand what the real idea was behind “no silos”. Instead of actually critiquing the idea, he pulls out his “architecture astronaut” trump card, just like how any discussion of the war in Iraq can get you labeled “unpatriotic” in the US.

I think there is such a thing as being an “architecture astronaut”, and it’s something I’m often guilty of, but there’s obviously a fine balance between trying to write beautiful code and trying to write working code. If you focus too much on just getting code to work, it will be unmaintainable. On the other hand, you could spend forever refactoring your code, and it would never be perfect. The trick (as with everything in life) is to find the right balance.

I just wish Joel wouldn’t vilify that sort of high-level thinking so much. I think it’s important to always try to think big-picture. If we use the construction analogy, Joel would be advocating thinking only about the houses and not about the communities. He’d be building sprawling suburbs instead of livable cities.

(Photo by Jan Tik on Flickr)

Why can’t my RSS play with your email?

Over at Signal vs. Noise, Matt talks about taming the RSS beast:

Is keeping up with RSS feeds a challenge for you? If so, what solution would you like to see? Are there blogs or software tools out there that are already doing some/all of the above well? Let’s hear about it.

I probably subscribe to fewer RSS feeds than most people — I’ve got 16 in there right now, and less than half of those publish even a post per day. And still, I find it to be an annoyance sometimes. It’s just oh so compelling to click on those Bold Headlines (56).

In the comments to the SvN article, several people suggest that you should only subscribe to feeds that you can’t miss, and the rest you should keep as bookmarks in your browser. What if I don’t keep bookmarks in my browser? I work on several different computers during the day, and one of the things I love about subscribing to RSS feeds in Bloglines is that everything I want to read is in one place, and accessible from any computer.

Jeff raises a good point:

I don’t have any answer, but this post got me wondering: is there really a fundamental difference between managing your RSS feeds versus managing your email inbox. Of course there are differences, but basically you just need a way to prioritize and quickly evaluate what you want/need to deal with now versus later. How do you manage your inbox? Why can’t you use a similar approach to feeds?

This is something I’ve been thinking about for a long time. We deal with all kinds of information on a daily basis, in many different formats: email, blog postings, rss feeds, documents, bookmarks, etc. Each one of these formats has is managed by a different application, each one with its own features and quirks. Every application you have to be familiar with adds a little bit more to your cognitive load. Why do we insist on segregating our data based on its format? Couldn’t a single application be able to deal with different data formats?

This is something I will be writing about a lot more on this blog — the problems with current information managment software, and what can be done to fix them. Stay tuned.