Design Implications for Personal Information Management: A Theoretical Evaluation of a Prototype Interface

Personal Information management (PIM) is a research area that receives interest from a variety of disciplines including human-computer interaction, information retrieval, information systems research and psychology to mention but a few. The diversity in approaches and the cross-disciplinary nature of PIM have resulted in a fragmented picture of the problems and challenges designers of PIM tools are facing. In this paper we present a PIM evaluation framework based on a broad literature study of the known challenges within PIM. Focusing in particular on information fragmentation and the re-finding of information, we built and evaluated a PIM prototype using our framework. We found that zooming, separation between logical and physical structures, and showing search results in context seem like useful future design ideas.