Evolution and Evaluation of an Information Scrap Manager

The Jourknow project addresses the question of freeform notes known as information scraps. We are focused on unifying the user’s PIM tools, providing lightweight input and enabling support for uncommon types of personal information. In this position paper we describe our current directions and lessons learned from work on the Jourknow system. We have redesigned our lightweight input language for capture of arbitrary data types and developed a mobile phone client. We report on feedback from a weeklong user study, generating design recommendations for systems like Jourknow. Our study identified the importance of supporting common PIM data in addition to uncommon information types, of providing a mobile solution for capture and retrieval of notes, and of integrating with current user tools and practice. With respect to evaluation, we reflect on the large scale of personal information needed to evaluate our tools.