Telling Stories with Dialogue Boxes to Retrieve Documents

Nowadays, it is common for users to handle large numbers of documents. Organizing and retrieving those documents is extremely difficult using the tools commonly provided for those tasks. The use of document-describing narratives constitutes an alternate, easier way of allowing the users to do so. Narratives can help them remember important information about documents and are a natural way to convey that information to computers. In order to develop this approach, it is necessary to understand what shape do documentdescribing stories have. To this end we interviewed 20 users and collected 60 stories about documents. Analyzing these stories yielded a thorough characterization of their contents and structure and to extract guidelines on how to deal with them. We then validated those results by creating and evaluating two lowfidelity prototypes for possible story-capturing interfaces. We found that stories told to computers can be very similar to those told to humans, if the interface is properly designed. These results seem to suggest that structured text entry is a promising design for this interface.