Examining Personal Information Keeping in a Lightweight Note-Taking Tool

This paper describes a longitudinal field experiment in personal note taking that examines how people capture and use information in short textual notes. Study participants used our tool, a simple browser-based textual note taking utility resembling many lightweight tools available today, to capture personal information over the course of ten days. We examine the information they kept in the tool, how this information was expressed, and aspects of note creation, editing, deletion, and search. We find that notes were recorded extremely quickly and tersely, combined information of multiple types, and were rarely revised or deleted. Participants felt that our tool filled unmet needs and allowed them to capture information they would not have otherwise written down.