Abstract: Visualizing interaction histories naturally provide clues for people when they interact with artifacts in real world. But in digital domain, especially in personal information environment where people have to interact everyday; there are few interaction histories, which seriously reduces the working efficiency of people. The paper presents a model of interaction history and analyzes the different levels of user interaction. We bring forward the concept of the life cycle of personal information to manage the interaction histories of personal information. Based on the model and characterizes of personal information, we adapt a proper structure to visualize the interaction histories of personal information. Finally we design an instance, VisPA, to visualize all the interaction histories of personal information, which plays an important role in improving the efficiency of searching and managing personal information and to reduce the load of people cognition.
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Key words: digital information, interaction history model, visual structure, life cycle of personal information