Contextinator - Project-based management of personal information on the web

The web browser is a central workspace for knowledge workers, where they use cloud-based applications to access their information. While this solution fits nicely within our diverse ecosystem of devices, it may reintroduce and proliferate faults of the desktop, particularly information fragmentation. Information fragmentation is an increasingly important issue on the cloud as information is typically silo-ed within different applications. This results in users replicating storage and organization due to the lack of a unifying structure. As cloud applications become more rich, the need to investigate whether these faults of the past are still problematic becomes more important. To probe this question we created Contextinator, a tool for the web browser that assists in coordinating data for projects. Contextinator enables knowledge workers to manage cloud-based information and project artifacts in a centralized place, providing a unifying structure. In this paper, we discuss the design of our system, and the results of our mixed-method evaluation. Our findings contribute insight into the need for, and appropriateness of, projects as unifying structures for the web. Our results point to two types of projects we call 'preparatory' and 'opportunistic' based on when and why users create them.