Why use memo for all?

Abstract

Informal note taking is an essential activity in Personal Information Management (PIM). Most mobile devices support this via a suite of applications, employing both highly structured (e.g., calendar, task list, contacts) and loosely structured (e.g., memos) data formats. Contextual interviews and artifact inspections with expert PIM-on-PDA (Personal Digital Assistant) users explored task-toapplication mapping. Structured tools were routinely avoided for informal note taking in favor of unstructured ones, even though this made managing the information more difficult. Improved support lies somewhere in between, suggesting the design of an integrated architecture, which links data across all PIM tools and provides a persistent, universal organizational system.

The Times They Are A-Changin’: Mobile PIM is leaving the Paper Trail Behind

“…Earlier findings also show that even when users had portable electronic devices, such as smartphones and PDAs, they commonly ended up using paper [9,15,21]. Our smartphone user study suggests that this is now changing.…”

“…There are numerous reasons why paper has been so popular. While entering information into electronic devices has been seen as cumbersome [1,3,4,9]-for example, Lin, Lutters and Kim [15] found that 11 out of their 12 participants who owned a PDA still used paper-paper allows free-form entry and free organizing and juxtaposing of information [19]. Furthermore, paper makes it easy to create structure, emphasis, categories and grouping with colors, arrows, and circling in addition to allowing sketching [4,18].…”

“…Furthermore, paper makes it easy to create structure, emphasis, categories and grouping with colors, arrows, and circling in addition to allowing sketching [4,18]. Moreover, unlike many PIM applications, paper allows entering content at any level of completeness without any application/toolimposed structure [3,4,6,9,19,21].…”

“…Unlike electronic devices, paper does not need any start-up time and it never runs out of battery [1] in addition to being almost universally available, as users grab any piece of paper and use it [15]. Furthermore, paper is compact and easy to carry and use [9,19,21]-in effect, a catch-all, all-in-one tool par excellence [21]. Such paper tools as calendars offer easy browsing [6] with visual clues as to where in time the user is, and so few people make such mistakes as marking things to a wrong month on a paper calendar while this is a constant problem with electronic ones where information is more abstract and out of the context of the whole [5].…”

“…Many studies (e.g. [4,9,15,21]) have shown that paper is the rule and electronic devices and applications more of an exception in PIM. The situation, however, appears to be changing with increasingly smart mobile phones becoming more common.…”