Understanding Stories about Personal Documents

Hierarchies are the most common way to help users organize their personal information. However, their use is fraught with problems. In particular, the users´ documents, stored in the filesystem, are notoriously difficult to manage and retrieve. A way to alleviate those problems is to resort to a wide range of knowledge about the users, their actions and the world that surrounds them. Systems that have done so lack an organizing principle that helps users refer to all the information that might be relevant. We propose a novel user interface paradigm, narrative-based interfaces, that provides such an organizing principle, showing how knowledge plays a central role in understanding the users´ stories. An analysis of Quill, a prototype narrative-based interface for personal document retrieval, will show how narratives can successfully be used to help users retrieve their documents.