Richard Mander

A “pile” metaphor for supporting casual organization of information

A user study was conducted to investigate how people deal with the flow of information in their workspaces. Subjects reported that, in an attempt to quickly and informally manage their information, they created piles of documents. Piles were seen as complementary to the folder filing system, which was used for more formal archiving. A new desktop interface element–the pile– was developed and prototyped through an iterative process. The design includes direct manipulation techniques and support for browsing, and goes beyond physical world functionality by providing system assistance for automatic pile construction and reorganization. Preliminary user tests indicate the design is promising and raise issues that will be addressed in future work.

Working with audio: integrating personal tape recorders and desktop computers

Audio data is rarely used on desktop computers today, although audio is otherwise widely used for communication tasks. This paper describes early work aimed at creating computer tools that support the ways users may want to work with audio data. User needs for the system were determined by intervieweing people already working with audio data, using existing devices such as portable tape recorders. A preliminary prototype system – consisting of a personal tape recorder for recording and simultaneously marking audio and a Macintosh application for browsing these recordings – was built. Informal field user tests of this prototype system have indicated areas for improvement and directions for future work.

Content awareness in a file system interface: implementing the “pile” metaphor for organizing information

The pile is a new element of the desktop user interface metaphor, designed to support the casual organization of documents. An interface design based on the pile concept suggested uses of content awareness for describing, organizing, and filing textual documents. We describe a prototype implementation of these capabilities, and give a detailed example of how they might appear to the user. We believe the system demonstrates how content awareness can be not only used in a computer filing system, but made an integral part of the users experience.