Files
Abstract
The challenges associated with file management are numerous and daunting. Users havedifficulty organizing the files they acquire, retrieving files, managing access to shared files,
and deleting files that are useless or privacy-sensitive. While work in this field has offered
some assistance via tools that help users navigate disorganized file collections and more, they
do not address existing and future disorganization in a user’s file collection. We seek to close
this gap.
In this dissertation, we first investigate the organization of file collections in personalcloud storage. We then design new techniques and tools for automatically recommending file-
management actions to users in that setting based on notions we develop for characterizing
file similarity. We do so in three main investigations. In the first, we examine research
participants’ perceptions of file pairs in their Google Drive accounts. In the second, we
conduct two online user studies asking participants to organize their Google Drive accounts
in order to investigate real-time file management and evaluate the tool we developed to
assist file management, KondoCloud. In the last, we propose and evaluate a new format for
summarizing groups of file management recommendations. Throughout our investigations,
we describe how tools offering recommendations of fine-grained file management actions
based on similarity can support users in managing their personal information. We conclude
by discussing the design implications for future file management tools and identifying how
to adapt these tools to commercial settings.