• DOI:10.1145/142750.143055
• Corpus ID: 15424444

A “pile” metaphor for supporting casual organization of information

@article{Mander1992AM,
  title={A “pile” metaphor for supporting casual organization of information},
  author={Richard Mander and Gitta Salomon and Yin Yin Wong},
  journal={Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems},
  year={1992}
}

• Richard Mander, G. Salomon, Y. Wong
• Published 1 June 1992
• Computer Science
• Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems

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.