Article critiques: scenarios, stories

This post discusses the following readings:

  • Go, K., & Carroll, J.M. (2004). The blind men and the elephant: Views of scenario-based system design. interactions, 11(6), 44-53.
  • Gruen, D., Rauch, T., Redpath, S., & Ruettinger, S. (2002). The use of stories in user experience design. International Journal of Human-Computer Interaction, 14(3&4), 503-534.

I thought the best thing about the Go and Carroll article was their listing of differences between scenarios and specifications (though it would have worked better as a table than as text) and their review of the literature surrounding the techniques. I also liked the breakdown of strategy/requirements/HCI planning to year/day/moments. Apart from those squibs, I thought the article was unbelievably dry and unimaginative (which is odd, considering they’re talking about the importance of imagination in creating scenarios); for one thing, they introduce the “blind men and the elephant” story in the lead without following it up in the rest of the article. Do scenarios help us see the elephant? Or do they only show us pieces? By the end of the article, we don’t know and the authors haven’t told us. (I wonder if the editor made them tack it on.)

The Gruen, et al., article by the IBMers I thought was more interesting and meaty; they seemed really in love with their new tool which seemed to have united disparate stakeholders within IBM as well as their clients. I also thought it was interesting how the stories could be decomposed for other audiences as well, down to the design, marketing, and documentation materials. They don’t attempt to speculate as to *why* they think stories unite audiences with differing needs, but I’d guess that we’re simply trained, from childhood onward, to think in terms of linear narrative. A page of prose describing someone solving a problem is easier to read and understand than a functional specification document, which requires a specialist to draft. Stories don’t require specialists.

Their descriptions of its use made it seem like a silver bullet, and I would have liked to know what, if any, limitations they encountered. How do they control their stories, to keep them from becoming distended or unbalanced when descriptions get too specific?

I’d also say that what they’re calling stories are not stories, but extended scenarios that use narrative devices like character, setting, plot, etc. The chief characteristic of a story is that the character is different at the end of the story than at the beginning. Their example scenarios don’t have that quality; they’re more like Star Trek problem stories: Picard is trapped on the holodeck–how do we get him out? No character in such stories really learns about himself or his life. The interest is mainly in seeing people spew technobabble and race against the clock.

Likewise, the IBM scenarios attempt to trap someone in a problem and watch them squirm to get out. The interest is in watching this particular character squirm (would a different character behave differently in the same situation?) and noting the details of what they do to solve their problem.

Keeping Found Things Found

A web site focused on collecting and managing personal information, from the U of Washington I-School, with some help from Msft. I haven’t compared their publications list with our syllabus to see if there’s any overlap.
Keeping Found Things Found
“The classic problem of information retrieval, simply put, is to help people find the relatively small number of things they are looking for (books, articles, web pages, CDs, etc.) from a very large set of possibilities. This classic problem has been studied in many variations and has been addressed through a rich diversity of information retrieval tools and techniques.

A follow-on problem also exists which has received relatively less study: once found, how are things organized for re-access and re-use later on? “

How is it possible? More on email

The readings that prompted these postings were:

Lehikoinen, Juha, Antti Aaltonen, Pertti Huuskonen, and Ilkka Salminen. Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age. Chichester, England: John Wiley, 2007. [48-51, 84-94, 127-157]

Whittaker, Steve, and Candace Sidner. “Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email.” Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 13-18, 1996, 276-283.

The following response was to a question about whether a high number of emails are seen as a sign of prestige or importance.

Both of my managers receive upwards of 50-100 emails a day, depending on the crisis du jour. It’s more a sign that their world is probably wider than mine and that they have more responsibilities (and more corporate spam to filter out). Both would love to have fewer emails to plow through; sometimes the job feels like it’s managing email rather than getting work done.

Piles of unprocessed emails stresses both of them out. So it’s not a badge of manhood for them.

One of my managers has been there for 10+ years, and he’s a filer; his folder hierarchy is like baroque stained-glass in its intricacy. But for our clients and others on the team who don’t file, they know that he *does* file; hence, he’s usually the go-to guy for “do you have a copy of that email?” His ability to file and find stuff means they don’t have to (and he now has this reputation to live up to, so that adds to his stress). [Update: after backing up his emails to a CD, he deleted about 10,000 emails from his account, some dating back to 2004. And remember, he deleted lots of email too.]

I remember reading somewhere that our brains have a ‘doing’ function and a ‘thinking’ function. The trick is, that they don’t work at the same time. Reacting to email is a satisfying ‘doing’ activity, so most people probably don’t think too much about how to file something so they can find it later; they’re too concerned with taking care of business now. Sometimes we’ll think ahead and plan an elaborate system to process our emails, but when we start doing it, the system is awkward or cumbersome; I’d class making folders and filing as a system that some people find cumbersome.

Another part of the issue may be the just-in-case vs just-in-time mentality. A lot of us filers and packrats like to hold on to things just in case we’ll need them; but 80% of our files are never seen again. 20% I’ll access regularly, but that 20% is different for every user, which is why filing still winds up becoming a personal matter, even in a business setting.

I wonder if things would be different if we asked people to create their own filing systems as if someone else would be using them next year. Would they then take a little more time to create folders, to make life a little easier for the next person? They may be able to create just enough metadata for us to get by.

In what ways are your own personal information management practices similar to or different from those described in the two readings?I’m one of those unfortunates who believes there must be one true way to do anything; as a result, I keep shifting things around and never have a stable setup. My wife, OTOH, doesn’t seem to have this problem.re email: My email strategies for work and personal are different. In general, I’m more organized than the article subjects, partly because my role in the team is be the unofficial archivist and because experience with our customers has shown that I’m better at keeping these records than they are.

At work, my strategies shift and vary based on the work I’m doing and the tools I’m using. I used Outlook differently from Lotus Notes, for example. In general, I find myself dumbing down the email interfaces so they’re as simple to use as possible. I tend to create folders for each project I’m involved with and emails go there. Because we have storage restrictions, I will archive emails (usually emails with big attachments) to a separate database on my hard drive; I have an agent set up to archive mails over 6 months old. For the database on my hard drive, I have full-text indexing turned on as this lets me search inside PDFs, Word files, etc. (Can’t do this with my active email database.)

After attempting to segregate mails by project AND fiscal year, I decided last year to keep all project-related emails in one project folder and be done with it. (Notes lets you keep a file in more than one folder, basically a shortcut to the email, but I rarely use that.) I rarely think about metadata or context; like the article subjects, I’m concerned with the next deadline or commitment and long-term storage and access isn’t part of my everyday thinking.

We’ve found that it’s best after a project is over or some disaster has happened, to draft a Word file that summarizes the incident, what we did, our rationale, important facts, etc. It helps to draw everything together in one place in a coherent narrative. Often, important meetings or phone calls are not documented elsewhere, and they sometimes need to be captured. I then email it to as many people as request to see it (safety in numbers; in case I delete my copy, someone else may have it); I also save it to our Notes document database on the network where it’s backed up and available for others to see.

[Aside: It strikes me that the Notes article is all about jumbled collections of individual items–call them ‘words.’ The Symbian developers are creating a framework to turn individual words into ‘phrases’ with simple grammar — “is part of,” “was taken on,” “is used by,” and so on. But there’s no technological way to turn those phrases into any meaningful sentences or a narrative, except in the mind of the user.]

My personal mail is kept in Gmail, with minimal labels (I don’t use multiple tags). I find the searches powerful enough that I only use labels for short-term personal projects.

Previously, I used Yahoo mail for several years; I archived all of that mail to my hard drive in 2006, and have gone back to it less than 10 times, I’d say. I just haven’t needed to. I use Copernic Desktop Search to scour files for keywords if I can’t find a particular document.

My files are organized primarily by directory name, but I have duplicates that have built up over time, and haven’t figured out a strategy to deal with them. I depend on the directory and file names to provide whatever context I need to figure out what they are. I may append keywords to filenames, but not often.

My photos are organized in directory folders by year, then by month, then by subjects. Music files are organized in directory folders by genre, artist, etc. I don’t really trust Picasa or iTunes or MediaMonkey to organize these things for me because their organization tends to be proprietary and require much organizational fiddling by myself, whereas they can all read the files in my directories, which I can arrange once and then forget about it.

I tend to think hierarchically and alphabetically, so that’s how I tend to arrange my files on disk; I fall back to Copernic when I just can’t find it by scanning folder and file names.

Fairfax City Public Library

For many moons I have been looking forward to the opening of a new library building in Fairfax.  I’ve been going to the old location for eighteen years, so surely progress is a good thing?  I noted:

1. The apex of the ceiling is now four or five times higher.
2. The space for computers is now four or five times greater.
3. The space to sit and read is now four or five times greater.
4. It now takes seven or eight minutes to park and get into the new fortress-like building, as opposed to one…

Fairfax City Public Library

Systemantics

I’m starting my third official semester as a graduate student but there are still a few nuts I haven’t cracked yet. I’m starting to wonder if they’re worth cracking or if I’m just worrying too much.

What I’ve been doing

Note-taking strategy. For both reading and classroom lectures, I still have (I think) a shockingly lazy attitude to note-taking. One of the issues is that this curriculum relies more on project-work than tests; I’ve only had one major test so far in about 6 classes. For the rest, class participation and assignments provide the grade. So notes are best used for specific assignments, as potentially interesting “just-in-case” reminders, or pearls of wisdom. I also note any books or authors the professors recommend.

I’ve tried mindmaps, Cornell notetaking, blank sketchbooks, and looseleaf. None of them have really done the trick. I was in awe of a fellow student’s rigorously maintained class notes using Microsoft OneNote, in which she kept all of her class notes since starting her degree, making them instantly searchable and sensibly organized. She also kept all of her citations in her RefWorks area, so that when it came time to write any paper, she could search through her accumulated references for keywords of interest. Made me feel like a proper novice. After I described her methods, my advisor said, “Hm. She needs to be studied.”

(I later learned that this student was a high-scorer on the GRE Quantitative, and that made me feel better. As I was a high-scorer on the Verbal, my brain is just naturally wired differently.)

As with most notetaking, though, I think it’s the act of writing things down that is probably more important than the notes themselves. I have had no need to go back to any of my notes. I am, in fact, more likely to keep the course reading list, as they are fantastic compilations of references I could never dig out on my own. And I have, in fact, gone back to them on occasion.

Researching and Writing Papers. I have a paper coming up and don’t really know how to attack it. DTSSTCPW? Zotero? Study Hack’s simple or complex paper writing strategies? I wrote two big papers last semester, my first real papers since starting the program. For the first one, I used a modified version of the notetaking for research found here (scroll down to the bullet point, “Use a system”). For the second, I used Zotero.

My file management for the first paper was horrible: I’d actually lost track of PDF’d articles I could have used. I had stacks of paper. My notes following the above advice were OK but not great. I also dug myself into a hole by spending a month trying out stuff like CiteULike, looking at research organization programs, and not doing the effing readings. Can you say “wake-up call”? For my second paper, it was all online research that I saved using Zotero, but I missed the ability to move things around and see everything at once, and I continually lost track of web page titles and stuff. So, not much better.

Reading. If there’s anything I can do, it’s read. The question is, how closely do I need to read. My 752 class last fall had a heavy reading schedule, with the class time really only focusing on one of the articles, or on a particular aspect of the topic. The reading provided the background and context for the lecture. I found that by mainly skimming through and reading the bits of interest to me, essential phrasings or ideas would stick in my mind long enough to make the in-class connections and make my usual over-the-top verbal contributions, and that tended to be enough.

I’d read something and think, damn, I should blog about that. And never did. Also, I had the feeling that I was really skimming the reading and not really connecting the dots. (This was compounded by rough seas at work and a brutal schedule that left only the minimum amount of time to do my required reading.)

One of the advantages of a college education is, as I read somewhere, you have the opportunity to read profligately. I won’t be reading this widely and this quickly again. I need to immerse myself in this literature as the whole field is new to me.

What I’ll do this time

For my classroom notes, I use a large ruled Moleskine Cahier notebook. I’m not going to worry about following a particular style of notetaking. I’ll just write down stuff that I think is interesting, pertinent to an assignment, or memory-worthy. The key will be to review my notes after class, update them with fresh thoughts, and correct my horrible script so I can decode them later.

The trick in keeping up on the readings is to do some reading every day and, if possible, reduce the number of other tasks and distractions that steal the time that the reading requires. I’m going to use the Moleskine notebook to keep my notes on the assigned readings. By doing this, I can write down my own thoughts and opinions, track what I found most interesting, and I can refer to the notes during class discussions. I like the simplicity of keeping the class and reading notes in the same book.

The nice thing about these notebooks is they’re lightweight and I can slip them into a folder or envelope after the semester is over, if I want to keep them.

I’m using a simple 1″ 3-ring binder with multiple tabs to segregate my syllabi and assignment sheets. I thought I wanted 2 separate small binders for each class, but decided to have one binder and use the tabs. Fewer things I have to remember to carry.

For in-class stuff, I have Pendaflex file jackets for each class to hold the current week’s readings and a standard accordion folder into which I dump the previous weeks’ readings. At the end of the semester, I’ll sort through the accordion folder to see if there’s anything worth keeping and then recycle the rest.

I have a short paper coming up soon, and I’m going to go 100% on Cal Newton’s simple version of paper research. I’ll fire up a Google Doc and start a continuous revision draft as explained in this article by UK coach and author Mark Forster.

Citations are not fun, but if I write them down correctly once in the approved format, then all I have to do is retype them. No big deal.

And what’s your goal again?

The overarching goal is to make my academic life (and thus, my larger life) easier to manage so I can accomplish what I need to do without having to think and re-think and second-guess my strategies every damn day. I have task management systems and processes at work to get me through the workday, and I want similar systems that will help me through these new challenges. The aim is to do as little thinking as possible about how I will do these tasks, so I can spend more time thinking about the tasks.

So my sub-goals are to track incoming information, sift and disburse that info to where it’ll do the most good, manage multiple projects, and to do so in as relaxed and easy a manner as I can manage.

More on email overload

Yet more reaction to this article:

Whittaker, Steve, and Candace Sidner. “Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email.” Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 13-18, 1996, 276-283.

From a records management POV, I had these thoughts:

  • People are so overwhelmed when they’re in the thick of their email, that they can’t discern an immediate difference between the ephemeral and the archive-worthy. (This is even though they describe their jobs as mostly managing email.) For this reason also, we can’t depend on them to prune their stash of mails.
  • If the users can’t categorize their mails so they can locate them, then records managers will have even less success at helping anyone find them later.
  • If we’re faced with having to archive everything, then nothing is of value. You can’t find the needle if you keep adding hay to the stack.
  • If we establish retention policies, then we’re the only ones who will follow them. I perceive these users as being so busy, that they will think of archiving as someone else’s job. They already have too much work to do.
  • The article doesn’t address the issue of file attachments (I use Gmail for file storage as much as for communication) or of the corporation owning your email. File attachments are as important as emails these days.
  • Again, it’s not mentioned, but users are more likely to hear from corporate IT that their inboxes are taking up too much storage space and that’s when they have to purge. At [previous workplaces], we took training now and then on retaining records, but you hear more often that you need to trim down your mailbox size.

Other stray thoughts and babblements:

  • This article was written over 10 years ago, and I wonder what biases or expectations the authors and the users brought to the topic of email and email programs. What were they expecting email programs to do for them?
  • Having used Lotus Notes at various jobs since about 1995 or so, I can testify that its general yuckiness contributed mightily to the users’ problems. Although Notes has added buttons to let you copy a mail into a calendar or to-do entry, those are areas of Notes that users I’ve worked with know very little about, like the Journal or To Do areas. You can make Notes remind you to do things regarding your mail or tasks arising from it, but it requires you to click buttons and takes you away from the inbox, which seems to be everyone’s home base. When people leave the inbox pane, Notes is a lot more forbidding and cold, with toolbars and commands appearing that don’t have anything to do with email. (Which makes sense–Notes is a document database program with an apparently sophisticated macro programming language, and these toolbars and commands help with database and record manipulation; an email is just another document in the database to Notes, but that’s not how users see an email record. I read somewhere that the original developers built the email app originally just to show what could be done with the language; but it turned out that customers wanted emails more than the databases.)
  • That said, Notes STILL doesn’t have a threaded message feature as Outlook does and it regularly frustrates me. Add to this annoyance the extra one that [my workplace’s] Notes team has turned off full-text indexing, so searches are slow and incomplete, and you can’t search within file attachments. I can’t say enough bad things about Notes.
  • It would be easy to blame the users for not managing their emails, but the problem also lies with the app developers who either don’t listen or are unable to accommodate technical improvements that might make life a little easier for their users.
  • I think these users were not taught good work habits, basically, and probably expected Notes to do the thinking about their work for them (there I go, blaming the user). I doubt any of them had 90 voicemails just sitting there, yet they’d have twice that many emails just sitting there. What is it about the email UI or the promise of email that makes people think their work is done?

On the subject of Gmail Overload, here are two links to how a PR guy uses Gmail as the center of his information universe. These postings include links to other articles in the series where he contorts Gmail into painful positions.

Micro Persuasion: Turn Gmail Into Your Personal Nerve Center
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/02/transform_gmail.html

Micro Persuasion: How to Use Gmail as a Business Diary and More Tips
http://www.micropersuasion.com/2007/04/a_few_weeks_bac.html

This link is to a guy who thought email was great and now thinks it’s bad.
THE WORLD QUESTION CENTER
http://www.edge.org/q2008/q08_print.html#pollack

Email overload, content management

As verbose as I am in class, you should read my postings on the Blackboard discussion boards. Oh wait, you can’t. Oh wait, you can — if I re-post them here.
It’s not as narcissistic and self-involved as it sounds, though it’s that, too. I spend goodly bits of time and brain energy writing my posts, and I’m not keen on them disappearing into the digital ether when the class is over. I sometimes also put links to various sites in these mini-essays, so for that reason also, it would be fun to keep them around.

Herewith, a reaction to the following readings:

  • Lehikoinen, Juha, Antti Aaltonen, Pertti Huuskonen, and Ilkka Salminen. Personal Content Experience: Managing Digital Life in the Mobile Age. Chichester, England: John Wiley, 2007. [48-51, 84-94, 127-157]
  • Whittaker, Steve, and Candace Sidner. “Email Overload: Exploring Personal Information Management of Email.” Paper presented at the Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 13-18, 1996, 276-283.

For the Lotus Notes scenario, I imagine that the lack of standardized practices and behaviors would make the retrieval of important emails very difficult. (Would it make the storage difficult? I don’t know.) I believe most of the metadata in the emails would be the obvious stuff, such as the standard To: From:, etc., and the header path information, and so on. These could provide clues.

But the only clue to the content of emails (and perhaps their attachments) would be in the Subject line, which notoriously doesn’t change even when the thread of the conversation changes. If the users create folders to hold their mails, then that could perhaps provide a further clue to content, but my project email folders tend to be few and fat, and so a single folder will hold dozens of different conversations and threads related to many different topics, spread over several years.

I’d bet that, if an old mail needed to be accessed, one could locate the file format of the email, see how the sender and receiver information was coded, and then a brute force search on this info would then give you a smaller pile of messages to search through, but it’d still be a pile. Date information may be helpful in locating something specific, if you know about when an event occurred.

I think there are very few emails that sum up the situation of a project or a decision in a coherent narrative. Most emails regarding a decision accrue over time and, without the sender or receiver there, I think it would be difficult to recapture context, motivation, and other crucial information that would help you understand the import of an email message. It would be as difficult for the sender or receiver to piece together as it would an outsider.

I thought the Symbian developers’ metadata framework pretty interesting and intriguing, really carrying metadata as far as they could take it. Their focus is on automating the metadata extraction to the fullest extent possible and not depending on the user to do more than take a picture, select a name, send an email, make a call — the users use their phones instead of managing files. (The Notes users by contrast were on their own in managing their files, content, and metadata.)The associative web of relationships, separating the metadata from the content, and use of meta-metadata I thought was a really clever way to capture, organize, and retrieve context and association from the mass of stuff that users collect on their mobile devices.By kind of taking the user out of the record-keeping loop, their framework enables an outsider to examine the associative links and probably deduce or intuit connections that would not otherwise be possible. The framework connects lots of dots but there still may not be a complete picture; but I think this approach gets you closer to the picture than the scattergun emails do. It would have even more power for the user, because the links and associations may help remind her of circumstances she may have forgotten.One thing we didn’t see in the extract was just how the user uses this stuff at their home pc. The writers said that synching files was a tough job, and certainly storage on a mobile device isn’t unlimited, so at some point those photos and mp3s have to leave the device and live somewhere else. How are those files and associations then stored on the home PC? Does the home PC have applications that can take advantage of all this rich metadata? Or have the developers in effect created a walled garden in which their framework does everything as designed, but no other technology can work with it? (That’s probably not their intent; their architecture probably allows for other developers to tap into the metadata framework; but aging and ill-documented architectures could trap data as easily as aging hardware.)

I was struck reading the last section by how all parts of their metadata framework are in motion. Files on my computer just sit there until I call them up. On this mobile device, opening a file fires off a round of associative metadata linking and updating; it’s almost bewildering trying to comprehend all that’s going on.