Reading #2: Planz to put our digital information in its place

Comments

Steven Hennessy

Shena Hoffman

Reference

Planz to put our digital information in its place

William Jones, Dawei Hou, Bhuricha Deen Sethanandha, Sheng Bi, Jim Gemmell

CHI2010 - Atlanta

Summary

Planz is an application which overlays the filesystem with a document-like structure meant to help in creating structural integrity and easier organization of items in the digital world. The application, built for Microsoft Windows, allows users to create an outline structure with inline links to documents, emails and webpages. The application is meant to extend the bounds of the filesystem’s idea of folders and subfolders, while still creating these in the background, based on a user’s outline. Planz relies on XML fragments stored in the filesystem to keep its structures. Planz was evaluated by eight people and found to increase “overall status & progress” of projects with a p < .02. Planz was not rated to do well with email, with a result approaching significance, p = .07.

Discussion

The most concerning portion of this paper is the fact that only eight people were studied in uncontrolled environments with only qualitative questions being asked for evaluation purposes. Serious revisions in the methods applied for evaluation are needed. Aside from evaluation, Planz accomplishes its goal of having users structure digital assets into outline form, avoiding the filesystem. However, after downloading and spending some time with Planz, the actual experience is not always the most desirable. For instance, sometimes tasks from differing main headings are related, yet placed in different folders, because they are not under the same heading. Additionally, there doesn’t seem to be any support for a calendar style view, which could help users determine when something was done, or when it needs to be done. Finally, there would need to be major integration with existing applications for Planz to be largely useful or successful. The provided integrations are nice, but not stellar and far from complete. Overall, Planz provides a style of “placing” which would probably help many people in increasing productivity. After a few more revisions, Planz could become a useful tool.