A Staged-Based Model of Personal Informatics Systems and Understanding My Data, Myself

Summaries

In this post I'm covering from both of the two papers because they integrate quite closely, one covering more macro level questions relating to why people collect information about themselves and one covering more micro level questions relating to how people collect information about themselves.

In these papers the authors, Li, Day and Forlizzi query groups of people who practice "self tracking". In their discussions with these people they look for patterns in their motivations and their practices to see what commonalities exist. At the high level in "Understanding My Data, Myself" they look at the motivations for collecting this information and group the questions that inspire self tracking into 6 types, Status, History, Goals, Discrepancies, Context and Factors and further group these types of questions into two phases, maintenance and discovery.

In "A Stage-Based Model of Personal Informatics Systems" the same authors tackle lower level questions about how people collect self tracking information. They identify five stages preparation, collection, integration, reflection and action and look at the barriers to each of these stages. Overall they determine that barriers in each stage can impact those stages that follow, that the process is iterative and people will return to earlier stages that each stage can be either user or system driven which impacts both the users motivation and engagement and that the stages can either focus on uni-faceted data from a single source or  multi-faceted data from many sources.

The results and recommendations boil down to three main points, collect as much data as possible as early as possible and as unobtrusively as possible, use the systems to reduce the work for the person using the system but don't limit their options and ensure that the system is responsive to the needs of the person using the system.

Thoughts

The authors mention the bias in the people selected to interview, that they are all selected from self-tracking enthusiasts and wonder what the impact would be to see this applied to the general public. In some cases this would be interesting (although I wonder if the general public's response would be: "Why would you bother?" to the majority of their questions), however I think the larger flaw in their studies was the relative newness of the bulk of their participants. Many of their interviewees had only self tracked for a few weeks or months and only a few had long multi-year experiences.

On the one hand I don't know that this matters so much because the bulk of the "interesting" aspects of these systems are important in the Discovery phase. However I don't know that they really cover what is important to the people doing this type of activity for really long periods of time, especially in cases where health is not the motivating factor.

It is interesting to see in contrast to the article on "Beyond Total Capture" the pull towards total capture that the authors here have. It makes sense that in order to more intelligently support users of the system having data ready to reflection earlier in the process is a strength, but they don't really address the privacy and inconvenience aspects of this collection. It would be interesting to address (possibly with their more public study) the comfort level people have with self tracking particular types of information.