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Many interfaces allow users to manipulate graphical objects, icons representing underlying data or the data themselves, against a spatial backdrop or canvas. Users take advantage of the flexibility offered by spatial manipulation to create evolving lightweight structures. We have been investigating these implicit organizations so we can support user activities like information management or exploratory analysis. To accomplish this goal, we have analyzed the spatial structures people create in diverse settings and tasks, developed algorithms to detect the common structures we identified in our survey, and experimented with new facilities based on recognized structure. Similar recognitionbased functionality can be used within many common applications, providing more support for users' activities with less attendant overhead.

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Information triage is the process of sorting through relevant materials, and organizing them to meet the needs of the task at hand. It is a practice that has become increasingly common with the advent of "at your fingertips" information resources, To explore the characteristics of information triage and its interaction with spatial hypertext, a medium we claim supports the process, we have studied subjects engaged in a time-constrained decision-making task using a large set of relevant documents. We use the study task to investigate information triage under three different conditions: one in which the participants used paper documents, and two others in which the participants used variants of VIKI, a spatial hypertext system. Our findings suggest that during information triage attentional resources are devoted to evaluating materials and organizing them, so they can be read and reread as they return to mind. Accordingly, hypertext tools to support the practice should facilitate the rapid assimilation and assessment of new material, aid in the creation and management of a fluid category structure, allow readers to track their own progress through the information, and use minimum-effort methods to promote the intelligibility of results.