Managing Personal Information across Multiple Devices: Challenges and Opportunities

Due to the constantly increasing volume of personal information (PI) and the current trend towards mobile devices, there is a growing need to provide access to PI across multiple devices. It has become difficult for a user to manage his/her PI across these devices. The current hierarchical systems used to organize PI do not support accessing PI across multiple devices. The aim of this paper is to discuss the outcomes of an interview study that was conducted to determine how users currently manage PI across multiple devices and to identify what problems are experienced using these devices. Results showed that participants found it difficult to access PI across their devices and do not know beforehand what information they need to access. These problems could be solved by providing an information visualization tool installed on their devices which provides a single user interface to facilitate an overall view of their PI.