Design and in-situ evaluation of a mixed-initiative approach to information organization

AbstractOrganizing personal information by folders or tags has proved to be effective for finding, remembering, and understanding information. However, past studies have shown that the cost of organization can be too high for some users to be worth the effort. Mixed-initiative approaches attempt to reduce the burden of manual organization by automatically identifying and suggesting organizational units such as folders to users. However, little is known about how such mixed-initiative approaches influence users' organizational experiences. In this paper, we explore a mixed-initiative approach that suggests high-level organizational units to users to facilitate e-mail organization. In 2 in-situ experiments with 34 knowledge workers, we study how our mixed-initiative approach influenced users' experience with organization. We show that our approach made it easier to create organizational units without negatively affecting recall of those units, and led to the creation of units that otherwise would have not been created. Our findings suggest ways computers and people can most effectively work together to organize information.