How people do information management

In this presentation, Victoria Bellotti, Principal Scientist and the developer of PARC's Opportunity Discovery research will talk about some of the research that she and her team did at PARC (a Xerox company) looking into how people do personal information management (PIM). They discovered that much of it happens in email as opposed to using other means as originally thought. They also discovered that email clients overloaded in terms of what they are being used to support and that overload appears to come from juggling complex interdependent tasks with many outstanding obligations to be tracked. Following that, they examined people doing task management more closely. Based on this extensive research, they developed some prototypes to explore ways to support task and activity management overcome email overload.