What makes re-finding information difficult? A study of email re-finding

Re-nding information that has been seen or accessed before is a task which can be relatively straight-forward, but often it can be extremely challenging, time-consuming and frustrating. Little is known, however, about what makes one re-finding task harder or easier than another. We performed a user study to learn about the contextual factors that influence users' perception of task diculty in the context of re-finding email messages. 21 participants were issued re-nding tasks to perform on their own personal collections. The participants' responses to questions about the tasks combined with demographic data and collection statistics for the experimental population provide a rich basis to investigate the variables that can influence the perception of diculty. A logistic regression model was developed to examine the relationships be- tween variables and determine whether any factors were associated with perceived task diculty. The model reveals strong relationships between diculty and the time lapsed since a message was read, remembering when the sought-after email was sent, remembering other recipients of the email, the experience of the user and the user's ling strategy. We discuss what these findings mean for the design of re-nding interfaces and future re-finding research

Towards task-based personal information management evaluations

Personal Information Management (PIM) is a rapidly growing area of research concerned with how people store, manage and re-find information. A feature of PIM research is that many systems have been designed to assist users manage and re-find information, but very few have been evaluated.This has been noted by several scholars and explained by the difficulties involved in performing PIM evaluations.The difficulties include that people re-find information from within unique personal collections; researchers know little about the tasks that cause people to re-find information; and numerous privacy issues concerning personal information. In this paper we aim to facilitate PIM evaluations by addressing each of these difficulties. In the first part, we present a diary study of information re-finding tasks. The study examines the kind of tasks that require users to re-find information and produces a taxonomy of re-finding tasks for email messages and web pages. In the second part, we propose a task-based evaluation methodology based on our findings and examine the feasibility of the approach using two different methods of task creation

Towards memory supporting personal information management tools

In this article we discuss re-retrieving personal information objects and relate the task to recovering from lapse(s) in memory. We propose that fundamentally it is lapses in memory that impede users from successfully re-finding the information they need. Our hypothesis is that by learning more about memory lapses in non-computing contexts and how people cope and recover from these lapses, we can better inform the design of PIM tools and improve the user's ability to re-access and re-use objects. We describe a diary study that investigates the everyday memory problems of 25 people from a wide range of backgrounds. Based on the findings, we present a series of principles that we hypothesize will improve the design of personal information management tools. This hypothesis is validated by an evaluation of a tool for managing personal photographs, which was designed with respect to our findings. The evaluation suggests that users' performance when re-finding objects can be improved by building personal information management tools to support characteristics of human memory

Nursing satisfaction in caring for elders

Despite the increasing number of Americans who are over 65 years of age, little research exists about the satisfaction of nurses who care for this population. This qualitative descriptive study investigated the factors that influence the satisfaction of such nurses, and yielded five main themes. Registered Nurses (RNs) reported providing high-quality care, developing relationships, and making a difference to be rewarding components of geriatric nursing. The nurses also discussed challenges, which included caring for elders with dementia and being unable to deliver the high-quality care they felt patients deserve. Several of these finding were consistent with existing studies that addressed nurse satisfaction in general. The results of the present study implied that recognizing nurses for their work and providing RNs with training related to caring for older adults may be effective ways to improve satisfaction. Recommendations for further research include conducting similar investigations that are both larger and inclusive of nurses who choose to work exclusively with geriatric patients. Research regarding effective ways to implement dementia-related education programs in the workplace is also suggested

BlogForever D5.2: Implementation of Case Studies

This document presents the internal and external testing results for the BlogForever case studies. The evaluation of the BlogForever implementation process is tabulated under the most relevant themes and aspects obtained within the testing processes. The case studies provide relevant feedback for the sustainability of the platform in terms of potential users’ needs and relevant information on the possible long term impact

The Official Student Newspaper of UAS

UAS Answers: Everybody's got one... -- Finding True North: Selected Readings from Kij Johnson's "At the Mouth of the River of Bees" -- Correction to the article "How to boil a frog?" -- Alaska to Germany: Oktober in Deutschland! -- They seen me rollin' -- The challenge of getting around campus -- Suddenly, College: Plenty of fish on campus -- Balancing a busy schedule with hobbies -- Spoken word poetry at Lemon Creek Correctional Facility -- Bake some delicious finger food this Halloween -- Casino Night at the Housing Lodge -- This is Halloween -- Addressing student concerns with the Mourant Cafeteria -- Campus Calenda

Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

The Global People toolbook: managing the life cycle of intercultural partnerships

This Toolbook has been designed for those who are planning and running international projects and who feel a need for guidance. It has its origins in a major educational project, the eChina-UK Programme, that created new collaborations between UK and Chinese Higher Education Institutions around the development of e-learning materials. The rich intercultural learning that emerged from that programme prompted the development of a new and evidence-based set of resources for other individuals and institutions undertaking international collaborative projects. Although the main focus of the work is on intercultural effectiveness in international contexts, we believe that many of the resources have a more general value and are useful for those planning collaboration in any situation of diversity – national, regional, sectoral or institutional

Where Are My Intelligent Assistant's Mistakes? A Systematic Testing Approach

Intelligent assistants are handling increasingly critical tasks, but until now, end users have had no way to systematically assess where their assistants make mistakes. For some intelligent assistants, this is a serious problem: if the assistant is doing work that is important, such as assisting with qualitative research or monitoring an elderly parent’s safety, the user may pay a high cost for unnoticed mistakes. This paper addresses the problem with WYSIWYT/ML (What You See Is What You Test for Machine Learning), a human/computer partnership that enables end users to systematically test intelligent assistants. Our empirical evaluation shows that WYSIWYT/ML helped end users find assistants’ mistakes significantly more effectively than ad hoc testing. Not only did it allow users to assess an assistant’s work on an average of 117 predictions in only 10 minutes, it also scaled to a much larger data set, assessing an assistant’s work on 623 out of 1,448 predictions using only the users’ original 10 minutes’ testing effort