my branch, take one
designers spend a lot of time whining about how unwilling people are to tag, or file, or organize their information in any way.
we say that people are too lazy, or too stupid, or just too busy, so it’s up to us to figure out ways that they won’t have to think about it.
we say we either need to:
a) make computers smart enough to do our organizing for us – AI, machine learning;
b) let the experts do the organizing and the rest of us can benefit – semantic web, digital libraries;
c) let people be lazy and stupid and busy, but rely on the assumption that, when all of their input is pooled together, the wisdom of the crowd will prevail – tagging, folksonomies.
the problems that i see with these arguments are:
a) computers are cool, but so are our brains, and one thing that our brains Really excel at is grouping things together for interesting reasons. it seems silly to not let ourselves do our stuff. there are plenty of things that the computer is better at than we are, like keeping track of stuff after we make groups out of it, and manipulating the information once we find what we want. why don’t we divide and conquer?
b) this doesn’t help us with our personal information, which is growing daily, and which is increasingly overlapping with “public” information. what is my record of visited websites? what are the copies of papers or music or art that i download? what are my notes on things that are otherwise in the public domain? digitization makes us each the keepers of our own personal overlay of a huge library of information, and other people will never be able to organize it for us.
c) this goes a long way, but tags themselves can become overwhelming. we shouldn’t completely spurn the power of a meaningful hierarchy. this also doesn’t help with all personal information. sometimes we’re the only one who sees things, and sometimes we really do want Our tags.
bottom line: i think that some amount of annotation is necessary for us to manage our digital information, and we shouldn’t write ourselves out of the picture. interfaces can do a lot more to help people figure out where to put things, and i want to test some ideas about how that might look in the email environment.
starting questions:
what problems do people have right now?
– initial interviews
– booklets
what are designers already doing?
– initial lit review
– gmail
what should be possible within an email interface, but currently isn’t (or is deeply hidden)?
– filtering by any criteria
– tracing a trail of related messages
– annotation without submenus
– related categories/keywords always visible
what do we need to go to the next level?
– richer, more visible metadata
— not just tags, but tag types (facets)
— annotation integrated into current interactions
design questions:
– what can be automated and what can’t?
– what are the necessary facets? (how do we identify them and how many are there?)
– how static do these facets need to be?
– how does a faceted system compare with current systems in terms of:
— speed of retrieval
— quantity of annotation
— quality of annotation
— sense of “scanning a shelf”