Revisiting personal information management through information practices with activity tracking technology

Abstract

Personal information management (PIM) is an interdisciplinary research area with established theoretical foundations from information science and applied empirical research from human‐computer interaction (HCI). The increasingly popular activity tracking technology (ATT) has given rise to a new type of personal information about one's daily physical activities, which has not been scrutinized under theoretical frameworks in PIM. This article presents an in‐depth qualitative interview study supplemented by participant‐driven photo elicitation with 20 long‐term activity tracker users about how they manage personal information generated by ATT. Key findings include the identification of two distinctive user groups (i.e., consistent casual users and powers users) among long‐term activity tracker users and an in‐depth portrayal of these groups' PIM behaviors with ATT. These behaviors include concurrent and subsequent PIM practices, 6 types of PIM activities, and the use of a spectrum of PIM tools. This research provides timely theoretical updates to PIM under the background of self‐tracking technologies, outlines empirical implications to improve ATT in support of PIM, and offers recommendations for incorporating participant‐driven photo elicitation as a supplementary method for qualitative interviews in information behavior research.

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