“Finding and reminding” reconsidered

Abstract

In the July 1995 SIGCHI Bulletin, Deborah Barreau and Bonnie Nardi rightly point out that "every computer user spends enormous time and effort in filing and finding of electronic files, yet there has been very little research on the subject."To this end, Barreau and Nardi have investigated electronic filing and finding practices of the users of common desktop systems to determine "the factors affecting individual decisions to acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve information."While we applaud their efforts to study the most basic aspects of user/computer interaction, we believe they draw the wrong conclusions from their own research.Our goal in this paper is to explain why.From two studies, with a total of 22 subjects (four DOS users, one Windows 3.1 user, one OS/2 user and 16 Macintosh users), they noted the following similarities among all the users: 1.A preference for location-based search for finding files (in contrast to logical, text-based search); 2. The use of file placement as a critical rernindingfienction; 3. The use of three types of information: ephemeral, working and archived;1.The legal wrangling over "look and feel" reflects this fact.

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