Steven Houben Student Human-Computer Interaction

Pilers, filers and tossers vs desktop

Piler vs Filer

Introduction

There are basically two kinds of people: filers and pilers. The first tend to categorize, alphabetize, order and file all their documents while the latter tend to stack their documents in piles or groups of related documents. Both organizational styles seem to criticize each other but apparently there is a direct correlation between personality and organizational style.  This means that a persons actions is dictated by their personality type. Anxious people for example tend to be filers as everything in their world (and workspace) needs to be organized as they need to feel that they are in control of the situation. Pilers on the other hand seem to be "the big picture" kind of people who rarely get lost in details.  They use a self-defined dependable system in their piling method which allows them to use their spatial memory to remember what document or memo can be found in what pile. But there is a third kind of organizing style which is sometimes confused with piling: tossing. A tosser seems to deal with details by not dealing with them at all. He seems to have a clear lack of organization.

According to the Pendaflex research 48% of the population are pilers, 38% are filers and 14% are tossers. [1]

Desktop Metaphor

For my master thesis [2] I am planning on building a context-aware activity manager as an effort to re-frame the existing desktop metaphor [3]. The desktop metaphor was initially introduced to exploit the user's knowledge about the interaction with a classical desktop to decrease the complexity in human - computer interaction. In other words: the desktop workspace as you know it is based on your desk.

The problem with this metaphor is the fact that some tasks performed by users are exceeding the possibilities of the metaphor thereby constraining the user while performing the task. In other words: the desktop metaphor is holding back users in certain situations. In my master thesis I want to check how activity theory could help in re-framing the desktop metaphor.

File management

Modern operating systems let users organize their documents and files in a hierarchical file system. The desktop is used as the workspace and (cognitive) entry point of this hierarchy. Unfortunately this system forces users in becoming (partially) filers. Research has shown that there are three ways people use the desktop workspace:

1. Those who use the desktop for information piling and only file important information in the hierarchy (Piler). These people have different folders on their workspace that contain lots of documents related to specific topics. (fe. Work, Backup, Todo, Games,...) These people tend to have a lot of shortcuts on their desktop as well. Pilers also use the file hierarchy but only do this( once a month) for really important information or when they feel that their 'piles' are getting cluttered.
2. Those who keep their desktop clean and file all their documents in the hierarchy (Filer). These people use the desktop for documents and files they are currently using but at the end of the day or when the job is finished they immediately save their documents in the correct folder.
3. Those who clutter their desktop and file nothing (Tosser). Tossers simply drop everything on their desktop. They only seem to clean their desktop when nothing can be added to the desktop. Cleaning their desktop usually means copying all the files on the desktop and pasting this in a 'backup' folder.

Although many use the hierarchy to organized documents etc, multimedia files like audio and video are mostly saved in the same folder. An external application (fe. a media player) is then used to organize, search and manage the files.[3]

Since files are an essential part of activity-based computing I am considering to add some piling possibilities to the application. But before I even consider doing this I wanted to see if the numbers provided by the Pendaflex research are in fact correct.

I would like to ask you to send a link to this blogs to your colleagues and friends.  All they have to do is fill in the poll at the start of this blog.

Thanks

References

[1] The Psychology of Stacking,  http://www.pendaflex.com/enUS/PressRelease/The_Psychology_of_Stacking.html

[2] Steven Houben, Master Thesis, http://blog.anxma.com/master/

[3] Victor Kaptelinin, Beyond the Desktop Metaphor, http://mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11154