The Inherent Organization of the Paper Office: Implications for Electronic Document Management Systems

Abstract

As the technological availability of electronic document management systems approaches, questions concerning the appropriate user interface design must be investigated and answered. Much of this investigation must focus on the characteristics of the paper office which the electronic system is intended eventually to replace. Of immediate interest are the physical organization of the paper office and the organization of the mental model which users reference to aid their document management tasks. An exploratory investigation analyzed a small number of existing paper offices, modeled their physical organizations, and studied the behaviors of their owners in document filing and retrieval tasks. Multi-dimensional scaling techniques were used to discover the inherent dimensionality of the mental models the users had created of their paper offices. Protocol analysis was employed to infer cues used for aiding retrieval based on incomplete information. This set of cues was evaluated for candidate dimensions in the mental model of the paper office.

The results of the exploratory investigation were evaluated for user interface requirements of electronic document management systems. Classical DBMS query languages and data models were evaluated against the user interface requirements. These were found insufficient in the key requirements of simple filing procedures and retrieval based on incomplete and/or partially erroneous information. A user interface and data model is recommended that might provide higher performance. A research plan for a thorough investigation is outlined.