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ZOIL – A Cross-Platform User Interface Paradigm for

Personal Information Management

Hans-Christian Jetter Werner A. König Jens Gerken Harald Reiterer

Human-Computer Interaction Group, University of Konstanz

Universitätsstraße 10, 78457 Konstanz, Germany

{jetter,koenig,gerken,reiterer}@inf.uni-konstanz.de

ABSTRACT

In this paper we introduce the novel user interface paradigm

ZOIL (Zoomable Object-Oriented Information Landscape).

ZOIL is aimed at unifying all types of local and remote

information items with their connected functionality and

with their mutual relations in a single visual workspace as a

replacement of today’s desktop metaphor. This workspace

can serve as an integrated work environment for traditional

personal information management (PIM), but can also be

used for PIM tasks in a wider sense. By formulating ZOIL’s

fundamental design principles we describe the interaction

style, visualization techniques and interface physics of a

ZOIL user interface. Furthermore we discuss ZOIL’s ability

to provide nomadic PIM environments for mobile and

stationary use.

Author Keywords

personal information management, post-WIMP user

interfaces, information visualization, zoomable user

interfaces, object-oriented user interfaces.

ACM Classification Keywords

H5.2. Information interfaces and presentation (e.g., HCI):

User Interfaces.

INTRODUCTION

Throughout its history Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)

and related disciplines have been striving to research and

design novel usable user interfaces that unify qualities like

learnability, suitability for the task, “intuitiveness” or

attractiveness. Thereby the proposed designs have always

been influenced by the then-available technology and the

personal, organizational or societal values of the time. Thus

the user interface (UI) of the personal computer has

undergone many changes to become “graphical”,

“intuitive”, “object-oriented” [10] or “direct-manipulative”

[35], but also “web-based”, “nomadic” [30], “ubiquitous”

[5] or “social” [14]. Most functionality has been deployed

to the user as local “desktop applications”, but some also as

“objects”, “templates” and “views” [27], as “activities” [5],

or as “web widgets”, “web services” or “web applications”

based on dynamically generated hypertext [1]. Even the

local file system has changed its face from a simple

hierarchical storage structure into a versatile database with

indices of content and metadata [11, 12] to allow new ways

of querying and accessing personal information.

Over the decades this great diversity of usage scenarios and

design goals has left many traces in today’s design of our

personal information management tools. Although the

desktop metaphor is still thought to be the centerpiece of

PIM activities and work environments, our PCs, laptops,

smart phones or PDAs are packed or even bloated with a

multitude of non-interoperable specialized PIM applications

and websites which carry out the actual work (e.g. Google

Calendar, Facebook, BSCW or Microsoft Outlook). Most of

these use incompatible storage formats and inconsistent

interaction models (e.g. desktop GUI applications vs.

hypertext-driven web applications [29]) which have further

hollowed out the role of the desktop metaphor [20].

For many PIM users these inconsistencies have led to an

almost paralyzing amount of necessary workarounds and to

a destructive degree of complexity and “information

fragmentation” [24]. Content and functionality are scattered

over dozens of applications, websites, storage formats,

interaction models or devices with each one posing an

individual challenge to the user’s cognitive skills. Jef

Raskin has identified this critical weakness of today’s

“mazelike” interface (Raskin, [32]) as one of the main

problems standing between current technology and

tomorrow’s “humane interface”. He regards “fundamental

changes in the design of human-machine interfaces” as

inevitable, since “nothing less will do”. The prospects of

such a fundamental change have led researchers to suggest

designs for the “integrated digital work environments” of

tomorrow which go “beyond the desktop metaphor” and

open all new perspectives for personal information

management [23]. The goal is to design a general-purpose

interface suitable for many different devices which unifies

all kinds of content and functionality under a consistent

interaction model while leaving the user the possibilities to

Presented at: Personal Information Management 2008 (PIM 2008), CHI 2008 Workshop, April 5-6, 2008, Florence, Italy

Konstanzer Online-Publikations-System (KOPS)

URN: http://nbn-resolving.de/urn:nbn:de:bsz:352-opus-75367

URL: http://kops.ub.uni-konstanz.de/volltexte/2009/7536

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Summary of Contents

Page 1 - INTRODUCTION

1ZOIL – A Cross-Platform User Interface Paradigm for Personal Information Management Hans-Christian Jetter Werner A. König Jens Gerken

Page 2 - PREVIOUS AND RELATED WORK

establish own workflows, data structures or views on her information space. At the Human-Computer Interaction Group (HCIG) of the University of Kons

Page 3

3A more formal model of this abstraction can be easily achieved by following an object-oriented (OO) approach: All information is contained in numer

Page 4

For this reason all local and remote information items in ZOIL are regarded as objects of different classes as described in the aforementioned OO mo

Page 5

5or application boundaries as is often the case in today’s application-oriented work environments. To control the information that goes into such po

Page 6

single spot in the information landscape. Unless they are filtered out with dynamic queries and nesting or unless they are manually assigned exclusi

Page 7

7The information landscape in ZOIL can be regarded as such an attempt to visually map as much as possible of the user’s PSI and to provide a visual

Page 8 - REFERENCES

internet application. This creates the illusion of a pervasive nomadic PIM environment which is not bound to specific operating systems or devices b

Page 9

910. Collins, D. Designing object-oriented user interfaces. Benjamin Cummings, Redwood City, CA, USA, 1995. 11. Cutrell, E., Dumais, S.T. and Teevan

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