Towards Content-Aware Personal Electronic Records Management at Home

<p>This thesis addresses the question of how people manage the electronic records that they and their households receive and must deal with in their daily lives at home, such as bills, receipts, and warranties. The tasks involved in managing personal electronic records at home can cause frustration and oversights can result in unnecessary costs, such as fines for overdue bills or driving an unregistered vehicle. These insights were then used in a design science approach to inform the development and testing of an application to assist in the management of personal electronic records.</p> <p>Four stages of research were conducted: two stages of need finding, followed by the design of a prototype (as a technology probe) and then its evaluation with participants. First, a virtual guided tour was used to understand how participants managed their personal records at home. The responses and observations are reported qualitatively. The second research stage comprised an online survey designed to identify how participants' behaviours and practices related to the pain-points they encountered, and their reported satisfaction with their personal electronic records management. It was found that individuals at home often have the choice to receive records in hardcopy or electronically, noting that electronic records are less disposed to scrutiny, thereby risking oversights. An issue was identified with respect to ‘<i>pull</i>’ records that are sent by email in the form of hyperlinks, which risks that the user may no longer have access to the record after the relationship with the service provider has ended. The third stage was the development of an instantiation in the form of an application using the findings from stages one and two. This application, <i>Pogglepod</i>, was designed to assist people with records management by downloading, reading, analysing and summarising the content of records such as bills. In the fourth and final stage, the application was evaluated using software lab user trials and followup interviews.</p> <p>This thesis contributes an example of the way personal records can be categorised, an understanding of the ways in which personal records are managed at home, and an indication of the link between records management behaviours and how satisfactory those behaviours are to users. This thesis also demonstrates how a personal records management application can assist with timely task completion, such as paying bills, by categorizing and labelling records, simplifying personal records management, reducing oversights, improving records management, and further motivating users to improve their records management. </p>