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Abstract

Folder navigation is the main way that personal computer users retrieve their own files. People dedicate considerable time to creating systematic structures to facilitate such retrieval. Despite the prevalence of both manual organization and navigation, there is very little systematic data about how people actually carry out navigation, or about the relation between organization structure and retrieval parameters. The aims of our research were therefore to study users' folder structure, personal file navigation, and the relations between them. We asked 296 participants to retrieve 1,131 of their active files and analyzed each of the 5,035 navigation steps in these retrievals. Folder structures were found to be shallow (files were retrieved from mean depth of 2.86 folders), with small folders (a mean of 11.82 files per folder) containing many subfolders (M=10.64). Navigation was largely successful and efficient with participants successfully accessing 94% of their files and taking 14.76 seconds to do this on average. Retrieval time and success depended on folder size and depth. We therefore found the users' decision to avoid both deep structure and large folders to be adaptive. Finally, we used a predictive model to formulate the effect of folder depth and folder size on retrieval time, and suggested an optimization point in this trade-off.

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Abstract

People who are collaborating can share files in two main ways: performing Group Information Management (GIM) using a common repository or performing Personal Information Management (PIM) by distributing files as e-mail attachments and storing them in personal repositories. There is a trend toward using common repositories with many organizations encouraging workers to use GIM to avoid duplication of files and management. So far, PIM and GIM have been studied by different research communities, so their effectiveness for file retrieval has not yet been systematically compared. We compared PIM and GIM in a large-scale elicited personal information retrieval study. We asked 275 users to retrieve 860 of their own shared files, testing the effect of sharing method on success and efficiency of retrieval. Participants preferred PIM over GIM. More important, PIM retrieval was more successful: Participants using GIM failed to find 22% of their files compared with 13% failures using PIM. This may be because active organization aids retrieval: When using personally created folders, the failure percentage was 65% lower than when using default folders (e.g., My Documents), and more than 5 times lower than when using folders created by others for GIM. Theoretical reasons for this are discussed.