We've said the words "info-centric" a lot in our neverending "who is our target user" discussions....finally, I'm starting to get an inkling of what that means.

Works with information does not necessarily equal Information worker

In today's white-collar economy, it is almost impossible not to work primarily with information. Everything comes through email, digital documents. Value is created by thoughts, ideas, communication and summarized in documents.

However there is still a difference between people who use information as a means to an end and people who's very jobs are to generate, document, communicate and disseminate information. The latter is our "info-centric" target user. The former is perhaps not interested enough in "improving" the way they process and manage their information flow to seek out improvements to the status quo.

I don't believe that job-type or industry-type determines whether someone is a worker who works with information or an information worker. Instead, it may be more of a personality type, which in turn can translate into that person playing a certain kind of role in a work team.

For example, the PM role in many ways is one of an information-cultivator. Someone who collects information from disparate sources.

• Goes after information that perhaps info-allergic team members are not interested in going out of their way to share (Andi always says, if someone really needs something, they'll come ask me...though he may be less info-allergic and more just badly-designed-software-allergic, aka wikiphobia)
• Documents it, pursues follow-up questions
• Communicates information between team members
• Keeps it organized so that the team as a whole has easy access to a shared corpus of knowledge...in order to...
• Facilitate intelligent, informed decision-making which in turn is...
• Documented to provide a consistent

My role as a designer is 50% actually doing design and 50% documenting and organizing those designs so that it becomes shared information throughout the development team.

Now just because someone doesn't have this kind of "information-cultivator" role at work doesn't mean they don't like farming their personal information. Pictures, personal bookmarks, booklists, etc... I think some people hate doing this kind of thing for work, but love doing it for themselves (precisely because when it comes to personal data, they are their own audience...so there's no negotiation involved, which is half the hard work of information-farming.)

Other roles might be less info-centric. For someone who is writing code, their primary deliverable is a working piece of code. They may rely on information to help define the scope of their work (specs, discussion threads, etc), but ultimately, the end-product of their work is not the information. In other words, the information is a means to an end. Again, this doesn't preclude an engineer from taking on the role of an information-cultivator (ie. commenting code and documentation), but it's not the defining characteristic of the role.

What are some of the symptoms of someone who suffers from info-centrism?

[Info-centrists do not necessarily exhibit all symptoms.]

• Understands and appreciates the difference between tagging and filing into folders. Perhaps even longed for it before gmail, del.icio-us and flikr.
• Feels strongly about the importance of documenting and sharing knowledge and decisions. Feels so strongly about it that they take it upon themselves to actually do some of this documenting and sharing
• Makes sure to write things down, doesn't like to depend on memory as a repository for ideas, information or knowledge

• Actually enjoys getting a lot of information, especially in "it's already documented" digital form. In fact, goes out and signs up to get more information than is absolutely necessary. Just needs a better way to manage it all.
• Doesn't delete a lot of stuff: keeps things around just in case
• Doesn't usually email people to re-ask for information that was already given to them and is probably sitting in their Inbox somewhere, they don't know where
• Feels strongly about not missing or overlooking information
• Files things not just to get them out of their face

• Enjoys the meta-task of setting up information management systems. Has perhaps tried several and continues to tweak.
• Invests in complex taxonomical structures (or would if the tools were better: ie. tagging)
• Thinks a lot about the semantics of things

• Interested in getting meta-information out of their information. Data-mining their personal information to get a sense of overall life patterns. Where are the bottlenecks? Who do I chronically not reply to in a timely manner? What are the crunch times?

Chandler is also designed for info-allergic users

Triage workflow is designed for info-allergic users who just need a better way to draw a distinction between "things in front of my face" v. "things not in my face".

But triage is also useful for info-centrists as well...primarily as a pressure alleviator. The theory is that info-centrists are easily overwhelmed by the massive amounts of information they expect themselves to keep track of and maintain in an orderly system. As a result there is often a feeling of panic, fear that they're missing some crucial information that they should have in front of their face.

By decoupling filing (organizing) from triaging (processing), we hope to give info-centrists some breathing room so that information-farming doesn't become a bottleneck on practical minute-to-minute functioning.

Comments

ChaoLam: I think I get the gist of what you're saying but it feels mushy (this is our ongoing hard science vs. liberal arts discussion :). I think you need an operational definition of what "information" is. For example, the programmer in me shouts out that a program (writing code) is information; in fact, it's a very pure form of information.

If I interpret what you're saying correctly, I think you mean users who primarily deal with PIM-type information (primarily emails, events, tasks, notes perhaps documents) on a day-to-day basis as their primary activity are our target users.

This differentiates against other info-intensive users, say, an author locked up in a log cabin with no contact to the outside world. Maybe this is what you're also saying at BitsAndPiecesVersusDocuments?

I completely get your example of the PM.

How can we make this actionable? Is it a means a filling out the nuances in the motivation and workflow of this important class of users?

MimiYin Ah, I think I'm defining information as information meant for human consumption (which is why I included developer documentation and comments). Code is generally meant to communicate with a computer or other code? Which also means the author locked up in a log cabin is trying to communicate with themselves and ultimately trying to write something that tries to communicate with society in general. So I would categorize the author as an Information Worker. But you're right, it's squishy and there's really a spectrum and the notion of Information worker is a matter of self-identification which can change depending on what aspect of your job you're dealing with.

It occurs to me that under this definition of Information Worker, someone like Mitch might not qualify. So there are really two categories of info-centric early adopters. One is interested in better ways of organizing and maintaining bodies of shared or personal information: essentially reference data. The other is primarily concerned with the enornmous amount of mostly ephemeral information they deal with and is interested in better ways to manage it (ie. things like GTD). Both need to demonstrate interest in new software...as in both need to be interested in the meta-task of finding better systems. However, there is a clear distinction between someone who is looking to manage reference information versus ephemeral information.

As for next actions, I think it would be worth discussing this wrt feature development planning and how we position Kibble. This is probably also helpful when talking about the Chandler Tour?