I just scroll through my stuff until I find it or give up: A Contextual Inquiry of PIM on Private Handheld Devices

While ownership and usage of handheld devices such as smartphones and tablets continues to grow at a rapid pace, we do not have complete picture of how people manage personal information on these devices. The few existing studies have typically used interview or survey methods to focus on personal information management (PIM) practices on smartphones. We present the results of an exploratory contextual inquiry study of PIM practices aimed at providing a structured, naturalistic overview of PIM on both smartphones and tablets. We find that people use multiple complementary strategies to acquire different types of information on their devices, and that people rely strongly on automatic chronological ordering instead of organization by subject, although this pays off most for smaller information collections. Deletion of information is strongly influenced by usefulness and personal attachment. Finally, we find that people strongly prefer browsing over search when retrieving information from their devices.