"Am I doing this all wrong?": Challenges and Opportunities in Family Information Management
Article No.: 138, Pages 1 - 28
Abstract
Running a household requires a large amount of labor, from ensuring multiple bills are paid to organizing important documents. Failure to manage such information can have critical consequences for the financial and psychological well-being of the family; however, little is known about how families manage the full scale of information encountered in the home. In this paper, we introduce family information management (FIM) as a set of overarching practices involved in managing and coordinating household-related information. To understand how families engage in FIM, we conducted in-depth interviews with members of ten families, which included guided tours of their information archives. We found that families struggle to organize, store, retrieve, and share information, and that there are significant socioemotional costs to this work. We propose opportunities for designing technologies to support FIM and argue that, given the numerous challenges and unmet needs, the understudied area of FIM deserves further investment of research and design efforts.
References
[1]
Mark S Ackerman and Christine Halverson. 2004. Organizational memory as objects, processes, and trajectories: An examination of organizational memory in use. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Vol. 13, 2 (2004), 155--189.
[2]
Ofer Bergman. 2012. The user-subjective approach to personal information management: From theory to practice. In Human-computer interaction: The agency perspective. Springer, 55--81.
[3]
Ofer Bergman, Ruth Beyth-Marom, and Rafi Nachmias. 2006. The Project Fragmentation Problem in Personal Information Management. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '06). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 271--274. https://doi.org/10.1145/1124772.1124813
[4]
Ofer Bergman, Noa Gradovitch, Judit Bar-Ilan, and Ruth Beyth-Marom. 2013. Tagging personal information: A contrast between attitudes and behavior. In Proceedings of the 76th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Beyond the Cloud: Rethinking Information Boundaries. American Society for Information Science, 93.
[5]
Ofer Bergman, Tamar Israeli, and Steve Whittaker. 2019. Factors hindering shared files retrieval. Journal of Information Management, Vol. 72, 1 (2019), 130--147.
[6]
Ofer Bergman and Steve Whittaker. 2016. The Science of Managing Our Digital Stuff .MIT Press.
[7]
Ofer Bergman, Steve Whittaker, and Noa Falk. 2014. Shared files: The retrieval perspective. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 65, 10 (2014), 1949--1963.
[8]
Ofer Bergman, Steve Whittaker, Mark Sanderson, Rafi Nachmias, and Anand Ramamoorthy. 2010. The effect of folder structure on personal file navigation. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 61, 12 (2010), 2426--2441.
[9]
Lucy M. Berlin, Robin Jeffries, Vicki L. O'Day, Andreas Paepcke, and Cathleen Wharton. 1993. Where Did You Put It? Issues in the Design and Use of a Group Memory. In Proceedings of the INTERACT '93 and CHI '93 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '93). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 23--30. https://doi.org/10.1145/169059.169063
[10]
Michael Bernstein, Max Van Kleek, David Karger, and M. C. Schraefel. 2008. Information Scraps: How and Why Information Eludes Our Personal Information Management Tools. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst., Vol. 26, 4, Article 24 (Oct. 2008), bibinfonumpages46 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1402256.1402263
[11]
Richard Boardman and M Angela Sasse. 2004. "Stuff goes into the computer and doesn't come out" a cross-tool study of personal information management. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 583--590.
[12]
Richard Boardman, Robert Spence, and M Angela Sasse. 2003. Too many hierarchies? The daily struggle for control of the workspace. In Proceedings of HCI International, Vol. 1. 616--620.
[13]
Richard E Boyatzis. 1998. Transforming qualitative information: Thematic analysis and code development .Sage.
[14]
Carrie Boyd. 2019. The Ultimate Guide to User Research Incentives. https://www.userinterviews.com/blog/the-ultimate-guide-to-user-research-incentives Retrieved Jan 05, 2020 from
[15]
Laura Brandimarte, Alessandro Acquisti, and George Loewenstein. 2013. Misplaced confidences: Privacy and the control paradox. Social Psychological and Personality Science, Vol. 4, 3 (2013), 340--347.
[16]
Barry Brown, Alex S Taylor, Shahram Izadi, Abigail Sellen, Joseph 'Jofish' Kaye, and Rachel Eardley. 2007. Locating family values: A field trial of the Whereabouts Clock. In International Conference on Ubiquitous Computing. Springer, 354--371.
[17]
Harry Bruce, William Jones, and Susan Dumais. 2004. Information behaviour that keeps found things found. Information Research: An International Electronic Journal, Vol. 10, 1 (2004), n1.
[18]
Andrea Civan, William Jones, Predrag Klasnja, and Harry Bruce. 2008. Better to organize personal information by folders or by tags?: The devil is in the details. Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vol. 45, 1 (2008), 1--13.
[19]
Andy Crabtree and Tom Rodden. 2004. Domestic routines and design for the home. Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW), Vol. 13, 2 (2004), 191--220.
[20]
Jacek Cwizdka and Mark Chignell. 2007. Individual Differences. Personal Information Management (2007), 1--15.
[21]
Allison Daminger. 2019. The Cognitive Dimension of Household Labor. American Sociological Review, Vol. 84, 4 (2019), 609--633.
[22]
Scott Davidoff, John Zimmerman, and Anind K. Dey. 2010. How routine learners can support family coordination. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2461--2470. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753699
[23]
Audrey Desjardins, Ron Wakkary, and William Odom. 2015. Investigating Genres and Perspectives in HCI Research on the Home. In Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3073--3082. https://doi.org/10.1145/2702123.2702540
[24]
Paul Dourish, Victoria Bellotti, Wendy Mackay, and Chao-Ying Ma. 1993. Information and Context: Lessons from the Study of Two Shared Information Systems. In Proceedings of the Conference on Organizational Computing Systems (COCS '93). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 42--51. https://doi.org/10.1145/168555.168560
[25]
Susan Dumais, Edward Cutrell, JJ Cadiz, Gavin Jancke, Raman Sarin, and Daniel C. Robbins. 2003. Stuff I've Seen: A System for Personal Information Retrieval and Re-Use. In Proceedings of the 26th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 72--79. https://doi.org/10.1145/860435.860451
[26]
Simson Garfinkel and Heather Richter Lipford. 2014. Usable security: History, themes, and challenges. Synthesis Lectures on Information Security, Privacy, and Trust, Vol. 5, 2 (2014), 1--124.
[27]
Bill Gaver, Tony Dunne, and Elena Pacenti. 1999. Design: Cultural probes. Interactions, Vol. 6, 1 (1999), 21--29.
[28]
Michael D Gordon. 1997. It's 10 a.m. do you know where your documents are? The nature and scope of information retrieval problems in business. Information Processing & Management, Vol. 33, 1 (1997), 107--122.
[29]
Murray Goulden, Peter Tolmie, Richard Mortier, Tom Lodge, Anna-Kaisa Pietilainen, and Renata Teixeira. 2018. Living with interpersonal data: Observability and accountability in the age of pervasive ICT. New Media & Society, Vol. 20, 4 (2018), 1580--1599.
[30]
Rebecca E Grinter, W Keith Edwards, Mark W Newman, and Nicolas Ducheneaut. 2005. The work to make a home network work. In ECSCW 2005. Springer, 469--488.
[31]
Debby Hindus, Scott D. Mainwaring, Nicole Leduc, Anna Elizabeth Hagström, and Oliver Bayley. 2001. Casablanca: Designing Social Communication Devices for the Home. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '01). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 325--332. https://doi.org/10.1145/365024.383749
[32]
Iulia Ion, Niharika Sachdeva, Ponnurangam Kumaraguru, and Srdjan vCapkun. 2011. Home is Safer than the Cloud! Privacy Concerns for Consumer Cloud Storage. In Proceedings of the Seventh Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS '11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA. https://doi.org/10.1145/2078827.2078845
[33]
Guowei Jian and Leo W Jeffres. 2006. Understanding employees' willingness to contribute to shared electronic databases: A three-dimensional framework. Communication Research, Vol. 33, 4 (2006), 242--261.
[34]
William Jones. 2004. Finders, keepers? The present and future perfect in support of personal information management. First Monday, Vol. 9, 3 (2004).
[35]
William Jones. 2010. Keeping found things found: The study and practice of personal information management .Morgan Kaufmann.
[36]
William Jones. 2012. The future of personal information management, part I: our information, always and forever. Synthesis lectures on information concepts, retrieval, and services, Vol. 4, 1 (2012), 1--125.
[37]
William Jones, Predrag Klasnja, Andrea Civan, and Michael L. Adcock. 2008. The personal project planner: Planning to organize personal information. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 681--684. https://doi.org/10.1145/1357054.1357162
[38]
William Jones and David Maier. 2003. Personal Information Management Group Report. In The National Science Foundation Workshop of the Information and Data Management Program.
[39]
William Jones and Jaime Teevan. 2007. Personal information management .University of Washington Press.
[40]
Bryan Kalms. 2008. Living with information: The household as a negotiated information system. PhD Dissertation (2008).
[41]
David R Karger. 2007. Unify everything: It's all the same to me. Personal Information Management (2007), 127--152.
[42]
Joseph "Jofish" Kaye. 2011. Self-Reported Password Sharing Strategies. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2619--2622. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979324
[43]
Joseph Jofish Kaye, Mary McCuistion, Rebecca Gulotta, and David A. Shamma. 2014. Money Talks: Tracking Personal Finances. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 521--530. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2556975
[44]
Mohammad Taha Khan, Maria Hyun, Chris Kanich, and Blase Ur. 2018. Forgotten But Not Gone: Identifying the Need for Longitudinal Data Management in Cloud Storage. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174117
[45]
Chiara Leonardi, Claudio Mennecozzi, Elena Not, Fabio Pianesi, Massimo Zancanaro, Francesca Gennai, and Antonio Cristoforetti. 2009. Knocking on Elders' Door: Investigating the Functional and Emotional Geography of Their Domestic Space. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1703--1712. https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1518963
[46]
Gilly Leshed, Maria Hrakansson, and Joseph "Jofish" Kaye. 2014. "Our Life is the Farm and Farming is Our Life": Home-Work Coordination in Organic Farm Families. In Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 487--498. https://doi.org/10.1145/2531602.2531708
[47]
Ian Li, Anind Dey, and Jodi Forlizzi. 2010. A Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics Systems. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '10). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 557--566. https://doi.org/10.1145/1753326.1753409
[48]
Yvonna S Lincoln and Egon G Guba. 1985. Establishing trustworthiness. Naturalistic Inquiry, Vol. 289 (1985), 331.
[49]
Wayne G. Lutters, Mark S. Ackerman, and Xiaomu Zhou. 2007. Group Information Management. In Personal Information Management: Challenges and Opportunities. University of Washington Press.
[50]
Thomas W Malone. 1983. How do people organize their desks?: Implications for the design of office information systems. ACM Transactions on Information Systems (TOIS), Vol. 1, 1 (1983), 99--112.
[51]
Lynne M Markus. 2001. Toward a theory of knowledge reuse: Types of knowledge reuse situations and factors in reuse success. Journal of Management Information Systems, Vol. 18, 1 (2001), 57--93.
[52]
Tara Matthews, Kerwell Liao, Anna Turner, Marianne Berkovich, Robert Reeder, and Sunny Consolvo. 2016. "She'll Just Grab Any Device That's Closer": A Study of Everyday Device & Account Sharing in Households. In Proceedings of the 2016 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 5921--5932. https://doi.org/10.1145/2858036.2858051
[53]
Anne Moen and Patricia Flatley Brennan. 2005. Health@ Home: The work of health information management in the household (HIMH): Implications for consumer health informatics (CHI) innovations. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, Vol. 12, 6 (2005), 648--656.
[54]
Carman Neustaedter, A. J. Bernheim Brush, and Saul Greenberg. 2009. The Calendar is Crucial: Coordination and Awareness through the Family Calendar. ACM Trans. Comput.-Hum. Interact., Vol. 16, 1, Article 6 (April 2009), bibinfonumpages48 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/1502800.1502806
[55]
Marilla Palmén, Mikko Korpela, and Kaija Saranto. 2012. Identifying health and wellbeing related information management activities and needs in families with young children. Finnish Journal of eHealth and eWelfare, Vol. 4, 3 (2012), 165--176.
[56]
Cheul Young Park, Cori Faklaris, Siyan Zhao, Alex Sciuto, Laura Dabbish, and Jason Hong. 2018. Share and Share Alike? An Exploration of Secure Behaviors in Romantic Relationships. In Proceedings of the Fourteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). USENIX Association, USA, 83--102.
[57]
Joachim Pfister. 2017. "This Will Cause a Lot of Work.": Coping with Transferring Files and Passwords as Part of a Personal Digital Legacy. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1123--1138. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998262
[58]
Laura R. Pina, Sang-Wha Sien, Teresa Ward, Jason C. Yip, Sean A. Munson, James Fogarty, and Julie A. Kientz. 2017. From Personal Informatics to Family Informatics: Understanding Family Practices around Health Monitoring. In Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing (CSCW '17). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2300--2315. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998362
[59]
Wanda Pratt, Kenton Unruh, Andrea Civan, and Meredith M Skeels. 2006. Personal health information management. Commun. ACM, Vol. 49, 1 (2006), 51--55.
[60]
Emilee Rader. 2009. Yours, Mine and (Not) Ours: Social Influences on Group Information Repositories. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '09). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 2095--2098. https://doi.org/10.1145/1518701.1519019
[61]
Stephen Snow and Dhaval Vyas. 2015. Fostering Collaboration in the Management of Family Finances. In Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Australian Special Interest Group for Computer Human Interaction (OzCHI '15). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 380--387. https://doi.org/10.1145/2838739.2838746
[62]
Timothy Sohn, Lorikeet Lee, Stephanie Zhang, David Dearman, and Khai Truong. 2012. An Examination of How Households Share and Coordinate the Completion of Errands. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 729--738. https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145315
[63]
Betsy Sparrow, Jenny Liu, and Daniel M Wegner. 2011. Google effects on memory: Cognitive consequences of having information at our fingertips. Science, Vol. 333, 6043 (2011), 776--778.
[64]
Laurel Swan and Alex S. Taylor. 2005. Notes on Fridge Surfaces. In CHI '05 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA '05). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1813--1816. https://doi.org/10.1145/1056808.1057029
[65]
Alexander Thayer, Matthew J. Bietz, Katie Derthick, and Charlotte P. Lee. 2012. I Love You, Let's Share Calendars: Calendar Sharing as Relationship Work. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 749--758. https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145317
[66]
Leslie Thomson. 2015. The Guided Tour Technique in Information Science: Explained and Illustrated. In Proceedings of the 78th ASIS&T Annual Meeting: Information Science with Impact: Research in and for the Community (ASIST '15). American Society for Information Science, USA, Article 135, bibinfonumpages5 pages.
[67]
Kenton T. Unruh and Wanda Pratt. 2008. Barriers to organizing information during cancer care: "I don't know how people do it". In AMIA Annual Symposium Proceedings, Vol. 2008. American Medical Informatics Association, 742.
[68]
Blase Ur, Jaeyeon Jung, and Stuart Schechter. 2014. Intruders versus Intrusiveness: Teens' and Parents' Perspectives on Home-Entryway Surveillance. In Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing (UbiComp '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 129--139. https://doi.org/10.1145/2632048.2632107
[69]
John Vines, Paul Dunphy, Mark Blythe, Stephen Lindsay, Andrew Monk, and Patrick Olivier. 2012. The Joy of Cheques: Trust, Paper and Eighty Somethings. In Proceedings of the ACM 2012 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW '12). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 147--156. https://doi.org/10.1145/2145204.2145229
[70]
John Vines, Paul Dunphy, and Andrew Monk. 2014. Pay or Delay: The Role of Technology When Managing a Low Income. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '14). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 501--510. https://doi.org/10.1145/2556288.2556961
[71]
Francesco Vitale, Izabelle Janzen, and Joanna McGrenere. 2018. Hoarding and Minimalism: Tendencies in Digital Data Preservation. In Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '18). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1--12. https://doi.org/10.1145/3173574.3174161
[72]
Francesco Vitale, William Odom, and Joanna McGrenere. 2019. Keeping and Discarding Personal Data: Exploring a Design Space. In Proceedings of the 2019 Designing Interactive Systems Conference (DIS '19). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1463--1477. https://doi.org/10.1145/3322276.3322300
[73]
Dhaval Vyas, Stephen Snow, Paul Roe, and Margot Brereton. 2016. Social Organization of Household Finance: Understanding Artful Financial Systems in the Home. In Proceedings of the 19th ACM Conference on Computer-Supported Cooperative Work & Social Computing (CSCW '16). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 1777--1789. https://doi.org/10.1145/2818048.2819937
[74]
Steve Whittaker, Victoria Bellotti, and Jacek Gwizdka. 2006. Email in Personal Information Management. Commun. ACM, Vol. 49, 1 (Jan. 2006), 68--73. https://doi.org/10.1145/1107458.1107494
[75]
Steve Whittaker, Ofer Bergman, and Paul Clough. 2010. Easy on That Trigger Dad: A Study of Long Term Family Photo Retrieval. Personal Ubiquitous Comput., Vol. 14, 1 (Jan. 2010), 31--43. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00779-009-0218--7
[76]
Steve Whittaker, Tara Matthews, Julian Cerruti, Hernan Badenes, and John Tang. 2011. Am I Wasting My Time Organizing Email? A Study of Email Refinding. In Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI '11). Association for Computing Machinery, New York, NY, USA, 3449--3458. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979457
[77]
Yaxing Yao, Justin Reed Basdeo, Oriana Rosata Mcdonough, and Yang Wang. 2019. Privacy Perceptions and Designs of Bystanders in Smart Homes. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., Vol. 3, CSCW, Article 59 (Nov. 2019), bibinfonumpages24 pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3359161
Index Terms
- "Am I doing this all wrong?": Challenges and Opportunities in Family Information Management
Recommendations
The calendar is crucial: Coordination and awareness through the family calendar
Everyday family life involves a myriad of mundane activities that need to be planned and coordinated. We describe findings from studies of 44 different families' calendaring routines to understand how to best design technology to support them. We outline ...
"LINC-ing" the family: the participatory design of an inkable family calendar
CHI '06: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing SystemsFamilies must continually organize, plan, and stay aware of the activities of their households in order to coordinate everyday life. Despite having organization schemes, many people still feel overwhelmed when it comes to family coordination. To help ...
A case analysis of a product lifecycle information management framework for SMEs
Information management during the product lifecycle has received a great deal of attention over the last few years, mainly because firms work in a complex business environment characterized by information overload, high levels of competitiveness and the ...
Comments
Information & Contributors
Information
Published In
October 2020
2310 pages
Copyright © 2020 ACM.
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery
New York, NY, United States
Publication History
Published: 15 October 2020
Published in PACMHCI Volume 4, Issue CSCW2
Check for updates
Author Tags
Qualifiers
- Research-article
Contributors
Other Metrics
Bibliometrics & Citations
Bibliometrics
Article Metrics
- 0Total Citations
- 261Total Downloads
- Downloads (Last 12 months)48
- Downloads (Last 6 weeks)6
Reflects downloads up to 25 Feb 2025
Other Metrics
Citations
Cited By
View allView Options
Login options
Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.
Sign in