Eileen Falke
Diploma Thesis Student
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My thesis supervisor is Jonathan Diehl.
The Associative PDA 2.0
This thesis describes The Associative PDA 2.0, a continuation and extension to the diploma thesis "The Associative PDA" by Diehl. It is a mobile system for Personal Information Management (PIM), which is the management of information that is relevant to a user and his everyday life.
The Associative PDA 2.0 is based on an associative network instead of the conventional hierarchical file system, and all personal information is connected with further information, representing a semantically meaningful coherency. The user is not only able to associate items manually, but also context information is used for defining associations automatically: the current date and time, the current location, and people present at the current location.
I implemented a fully working system, evolved following the principles of iterative user-centered design. The first iteration involves a paper prototype, the second iteration an interactive prototype, and the last iteration is the final implementation.
The main part of this work constitutes a four-week longterm evaluation of this system with authentic personal information to verify the design and usefulness. The study shows, that associations are beneficial in Personal Information Management.
The design is limited to a note-taking application as a representative example of a PIM system. I chose note-taking, because it is a mobile activity that often happens in transit and at any location.
Before starting the development, I conducted initial inter- views to receive background information about notes and note-taking, followed by a study that aimed at finding a trade-off between the size of a device and its functionality.
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Publications
- Eileen Falke. The Associative PDA 2.0: A Prototype of an Innovative Mobile System for Personal Information Management. Vdm Verlag Dr. Müller, Book, October 2008.
- Eileen Falke. The Associative PDA 2.0. In CHI '08: Extended Abstracts of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 3807–3812, ACM Press, Florence, Italy, April 2008.
- Eileen Falke. The Associative PDA 2.0. Master's Thesis, RWTH Aachen University, Aachen, Germany, March 2008.