Multiple devices such as desktops, laptops, and cell phones are often used to manage users' personal information, such as files, calendars, contacts, emails, and bookmarks. This dissertation presents the results of two studies that examined users' mental workload in this context, especially when transitioning tasks from one device to another. In a survey of 220 knowledge workers, users reported high frustration with current devices' support for task migration, e.g. making files available on multiple machines. To investigate further, I conducted a controlled experiment with 18 participants. While they performed PIM tasks, I measured their mental workload using subjective measures and physiological measures. Some systems provide support for transitioning users' work between devices, or for using multiple devices together; I explored the impact of such support on mental workload and task performance. Participants performed three tasks (Files, Calendar, Contacts) with two treatment conditions each (lower and higher support for migrating tasks between devices.) This dissertation discusses my findings: workload measures obtained using the subjective NASA TLX scale were able to discriminate between tasks, but not between the two conditions in each task. Task-Evoked Pupillary Response, a continuous measure, was sensitive to changes within each task. For the Files task, a significant increase in workload was noted in the steps before and after task migration. Participants entered events faster into paper calendars than into an electronic calendar, though there was no observable difference in workload. For the Contacts task, task performance was equal, but mental workload was higher when no synchronization support was available between their cell phone and their laptop. Little to no correlation was observed between task performance and both workload measures, except in isolated instances. This suggests that neither task performance metrics nor workload assessments alone offer a complete picture of device usability in multi-device personal information ecosystems. Traditional usability metrics that focus on efficiency and effectiveness are necessary, but not sufficient, to evaluate such designs. Given participants' varying subjective perceptions of these systems and differences in task-evoked pupillary response, aspects of hot cognition such as emotion, pleasure, and likability show promise as important parameters in system evaluation. / Ph. D.

Email has become deeply embedded in many users' daily lives. To investigate how email features in users lives, particularly how users attend to email and get lost within it, I ran five studies that probed how users determined relevancy of messages, logged interactions with email, gathered diary entries related to individual sessions, and investigated the gratifications sought from email use. For the first study, I performed an exploratory experiment in the laboratory to determine how participants assessed the importance of individual emails (N=10). The next investigation I undertook involved three different studies, which I detail individually: a survey on email usage (N=54); a two-week study of email usage (N=20); and finally, the application of Attentional Network Test (N=9). My final study was to validate my findings around the reasons for attending to email, this was done through deploying a survey that followed the Uses and Gratification Theory tradition (N=52) In my studies I found that the majority of attentional effort is around reading email and participating in conversations, as opposed to email management. I also found that participants attended to email primarily based on notifications, instead of the number of unread messages in their inbox. I present my results through answering several research questions, and leverage Conversation Analysis (CA), particularly conversation openings, to explicate several problematic aspects around email use. My findings point to inefficiencies in email as a communication medium, mainly, around how summons are (or are not) issued. This results in an increased burden on email users to maintain engagement and determine (or construct) the appropriate moment for interruption. My findings have several implications: email triage does not seem to be problematic for the participants in my studies, somewhat in contrast to previous research; much of the problem around email, particularly emph{getting lost in email} is in managing the tension between promptly responding to messages while limiting engagement with email; due to the social nature of the problems with email, modifications to the email client are limited in their potential effectiveness to prevent getting lost and reduce email related anxiety. / Ph. D.

E-commerce and transaction on the internet is getting more and more common in every individual’s life. More than 40 % of the worldwide Internet users have bought or made transactions through the internet. This means that there is more than 1 billion online buyers and these numbers will continue to grow. Due to the growth of E-commerce, organizations are searching and creating new technologies for obtaining and processing data regarding consumer’s privacy information. This tends to become a concern for the consumer about how the organizations treat and user the personal information about a specific individual, the purpose for this study is to examine and compare how big and small organizations works with privacy policies and personal information. The target group for this study is organizations that collects and obtain personal information. This is a comparative study with a Qualitative approach. Theory and collected data from the organizations have been compared, the interview method conducted was Semi- structured interviews. One small and one big organization have been interviewed and the collected data from the two organizations has then been compared against each other to find differences and similarities about how a small and a big organization work with privacy. The selection of the respondents for the interviews have been selected through different criteria’s where one the organizations works with E-commerce. The conclusion of this study is that there are no concrete differences regarding privacy policies between the two organizations that participated in this study although some small differences were found regarding the development of the privacy policies.

Personal information available online is known as a digital footprint. While many have a digital footprint, few if any, know what it encapsulates or how to control it. Technology and personal information are becoming more intertwined as technology becomes more integrated with everyday activities. Personal information can be defined as details that apply to a person such as race or shopping habits. Shopping habits are considered personal information by many corporations who spend money to track, or even predict purchases of individuals, whereas more traditional forms of personal information are details like gender, birthdate, and home town. With a wide breadth of personal information available, not all of it is equally valuable or personally unique. This project is dedicated to determining the content and size of a digital footprint, and assessing its impact for an individual by defining the discoverability of that content.

In this dissertation, I explore the ways in which theories and concepts of face-to-face interaction and disclosure management can be used to understand the construction of privacy on an intercollegiate sport team. The purpose of this research was to examine how team members talked to each other about themselves, and how they managed the personal information shared. Erving Goffman's model of social interaction and his concepts of "face" and "supportive work" frame the analyses of this study. Through semi-structured interviews and direct observations of the members of an NCAA Division III women's basketball team, I discovered the team's rules and the development of their communication norms, which were most salient during discussions involving the players' tattoos and two unanticipated team meetings. It was important to the players of this team that they were a close-knit group who got along well and supported each other. The players questioned the commitment level of a player who disrupted the team's closeness by breaking a rule or norm and refused to make amends for her discretion. My findings suggest that the team members negotiated how to demonstrate their commitment to the team and to each other by performing supportive and remedial work through disclosure during these two meetings. Even under those specific circumstances, a player maintained some amount of autonomy by controlling the depth of her personal information that she shared. Interestingly, the players did not indicate an experienced loss of control over their personal information after they shared it with other team members at the meetings due to the team's negotiation of information boundary management. Additionally, I found that the symmetry and reciprocity of disclosure differed between player-to-player and player-to-coach interactions.

Privacy is a fundamental human right. During the last decades, in the information age, information privacy has become one of the most essential aspects of privacy. Information privacy is concerned with protecting personal information pertaining to individuals. Organizations, which frequently process the personal information, and individuals, who are the subjects of the information, have different needs, rights and obligations. Organizations need to utilize personal information as a basis to develop tailored services and products to their customers in order to gain advantage over their competitors. Individuals need assurance from the organizations that their personal information is not changed, disclosed, deleted or misused in any other way. Without this guarantee from the organizations, individuals will be more unwilling to share their personal information. Information privacy metrics is a set of parameters used for the quantitative assessment and benchmark of an organization’s measures to protect personal information. These metrics can be used by organizations to demonstrate, and by individuals to evaluate, the type and level of protection given to personal information. Currently, there are no systematically developed, established or widely used information privacy metrics. Hence, the purpose of this study is to establish a solid foundation for building information privacy metrics by discovering some of the most critical constructs and dimensions of these metrics.  The research was conducted within the general research strategy of design science and by applying research methods such as data collection and analysis informed by grounded theory as well as surveys using interviews and questionnaires in Sweden and in Sri Lanka. The result is a conceptual model for information privacy metrics including its basic foundation; the constructs and dimensions of the metrics. / <p>At the time of the doctoral defense, the following paper was unpublished and had a status as follows: Paper 6: Accepted.</p>

People today use the computer for many simultaneous work projects and activities. The traditional file system was developed for storing and retrieving files and it and the desktop have not evolved with users' practices. The first part of the dissertation presents a user study that generates a better understanding of the issues and practices regarding the organization of documents in support of activities. The second part provides the design of an environment to organize information based on an activity paradigm as opposed to an archiving paradigm and delivers the instantiation and the evaluation of a system based on such a design. The system, called Docksy, provides an environment structured in workspaces. Each workspace is segmented in areas or panels. Users can use documents as elements to structure their workflow or to manage their activities by separating files in the different panels, and by adding comments, tags, and flags. The Docksy design aims to create a flexible, lightweight environment that is easy to use and can be incorporated into users' daily practice, old or new. Such a system could be used to learn about users' practices and their evolution. Docksy was therefore developed for a double purpose; the short term purpose of testing new features (panels, comments, flags, and tags) and the long term purpose of facilitating learning about user practices. A study of Docksy use was conducted in which twenty participants used Docksy for at least two weeks and they were then interviewed. The study showed that participants valued the panels and the comment features. The results of the study showed the potential for changing users' practice and the potential for the system to be adopted by users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Oregon, 2001. / Typescript. Includes vita and abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 232-236). Also available for download via the World Wide Web; free to University of Oregon users.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 218-227). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

The advancement in computing in the last three decades has introduced many devices in our daily lives including personal computers, laptops, cellular devices and many more. The data we need for our processing needs is scattered among these devices. The availability of all the scattered data in the devices in use associated to an individual user as one is achieved in a Personal Information Environment. Data recharging is a technique used to achieve a Personal Information Environment for an individual user using data replication. In this thesis, we propose a data recharging scheme for an individual user’s Personal Information Environment. We study the data availability to a user by conducting a simulation using the data recharging algorithm. This data recharging approach is achieved by using master-slave data replication technique. / Thesis (Master, Computing) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-06 00:18:00.19