Organizing Documents to Support Activities
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This paper describes a study in the wild of software for document organization aimed at supporting activities. A preliminary study of current practices with traditional tools was followed by the design and development of a program called Docksy. Docksy introduces workspaces explicitly zoned by movable panels and features document descriptors augmented with tags, comments, and checkboxes. Docksy was deployed for at least two weeks and users' practices with the new tool were studied. The aim of the study was to see how the new tool was appropriated and how people used the new features. The workspace structured in panels was shown to support users in clustering and separating documents, in having a holistic view of the document space, in locating files inside a workspace, and in managing temporary files. The study also shows how tags, comments, and checkboxes afforded the use of documents as explicit items in a workflow. The study suggests Docksy supports users in a variety of information and activity management tasks, including new practices for emerging activities. 2013 Springer-Verlag.
