Abstract
Despite the growing numbers and diversity of electronic documents, the ways in which they are cataloged and retrieved remain largely unchanged. Storing a document requires classifying it, usually into a hierarchic file system. Such classification schemes aren’t easy to use, causing undue cognitive loads. The shortcomings of current approaches are mostly felt when retrieving documents. Indeed, how a document was classified often provides the main clue to its whereabouts. However, place is seldom what is most readily remembered by users. We argue that the use of narratives, whereby users ’tell the story’ of a document, not only in terms of previous interactions with the computer but also relating to a wider ”real world” context, will allow for a more natural and efficient retrieval of documents. In support of this, we describe a study where 60 stories about documents were collected and analyzed. The most common narrative elements were identified (time, storage and purpose), and we gained insights on the elements themselves, discovering several probable transitions. From those results, we extract important guidelines for the design of narrative-based document retrieval interfaces. Those guidelines were then validated with the help of two low-fidelity prototypes designed from experimental data. This paper presents these guidelines whilst discussing their relevance to design issues.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsPreview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
References
Abowd, G.: Software Engineering Issues for Ubiquitous Computing. In: Proceedings of the 21st international conference on Software engineering, pp. 75–84. ACM Press, New York (1999)
Abowd, G., Mynatt, E.: Charting Past, Present, and Future Research in Ubiquitous Computing. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 7(1), 29–58 (2000)
Baeza-Yates, R., Jones, T., Rawlins, G.: A New Data Model: Persistent Attribute- Centric Objects, Technical Report, University of Chile (1996)
Bälter, O., Sidner, C.: Bifrost inbox organizer: giving users control over the inbox. In: Proceedings of the Second Nordic conference on Human-computer interaction, pp. 111–118. ACM Press, New York (2002)
Dourish, P., et al.: Extending Document Management Systems with User-Specific Active Properties. ACM Transactions on Information Systems 18(2), 140–170 (2000)
Freeman, E., Gelernter, D.: Lifestreams: A Storage Model for Personal Data. ACM SIGMOD Record 25(1), 80–86 (1996)
Gifford, D., Jouvelot, P., Sheldon, M., O’Toole, J.: Semantic File Systems. In: 13th ACM Symposium on Principles of Programming Languages (October 1991)
Gonçalves, D., Jorge, J.: An Empirical Study of Personal Document Spaces. In: Jorge, J.A., Jardim Nunes, N., Falcão e Cunha, J. (eds.) DSV-IS 2003. LNCS, vol. 2844, pp. 46–60. Springer, Heidelberg (2003)
Gonçalves, D.: Telling Stories About Documents, Technical Report, Instituto Superior Técnico (2003), http://narrative.shorturl.com/files/telling_stories.zip
Gonçalves, D.: Telling Stories to Computers. Technical Report, Instituto Superior Técnico (December 2003), http://narrative.shorturl.com/files/telling_stories_to_computers.zip.
Huberman, M., Miles, M.: Analyse des données qualitatives. Recueil de nouvelles méthodes. Bruxelles, De Boeck (1991)
Malone, T.: How do People Organize their Desks? Implications for the Design of Office Information Systems. ACM Transactions on Office Information Systems 1(1), 99–112 (1983)
Myers, B., Hudson, S., Pausch, R.: Past, present, and future of user interface software tools. ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction 7(1), 453–469 (2000)
Whittaker, S., Sidner, C.: Email overload exploring personal information management of email. In: Conference Proceedings on Human factors in computing systems, pp. 276–283. ACM Press, New York (1996)
Yin, R.: Case Study. Design and Methods. Sage Publications, London (1989)
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2005 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
About this paper
Cite this paper
Gonçalves, D., Jorge, J. (2005). ”Tell Me a Story” Issues on the Design of Document Retrieval Systems. In: Bastide, R., Palanque, P., Roth, J. (eds) Engineering Human Computer Interaction and Interactive Systems. EHCI 2004. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 3425. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/11431879_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/11431879_8
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-540-26097-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-540-31961-0
eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)