We specified concrete goals for the project: Compare different file managers with each other, in order to find out, whether or not specifc file managers are better suited for certain tasks. Also we want to find out if the user is willing to use a file manager which is not appealing to him, but its more efficient than the one he usually uses. This would allow us to give recommendations on which file manager to use for which task and maybe what to change on file managers users dont like, by finding out why they dont like certain ones.

The structure for the project we came up with so far, is as follows:

• Specifiy the goal
• Research literature
• Come up with tasks and create a task korpus for the study
• Design the study and conduct a preliminary study to test
• Recruite test subjects
• Conduct the study
• Evaluate the results
• Write the paper

Now that the projects goals are more detailed, we can focus our research for literature and related work on more specific topics.

We mainly focused on literature on:

• File managers
• Preliminary studies
• User studies
• User groups
• Evaluating study results
• Central limit theorem
• Mixed methods

Those topics are relevant to our research question because those cover the steps we came up with in the project plan. Relevant literature we found so far, was added to our file share. This list isn't complete by any means so far, so it should be expanded on in the future in different iterations.

Our initial idea was to split the subjects into 3 different groups: Normal User vs Advanced User vs Power User. This was discussed with the project owner and he told us to rethink the idea of splitting them up in this way. His concerns with our distribution was that there wasn't a clear and self explanatory difference between the normal and the advanced users. (Both would probably „only“ use the default file manager and commonly known key short cuts, so there wouldnt be that much of a difference between those groups) We discussed about our previous idea of comparing three different user groups and after the meeting, we decided to reevaluate and decrease that to two groups. (The average user which wants their file managers to „just work“ and the power user with a desire for customisation) We just couldn't think about a relevant difference between „normal“ and „advanced“ users.

For the three operating systems we so far decided to use each systems default explorer (explorer - Windows, ifinder - Mac, nautilus - Ubuntu Linux) as well as each of the command lines. We also want to look for additional downloadable ones for each system and pick one of those. Last but not least, as we want to also take a look at some obscure filemanagers, we have to find one of those for each OS as well. In order to get an idea of what file managers real power users are using we contacted Dr. Raphael Wimmer and Andreas Schmidt. More details about the specific file managers that will be used, follow in the next entry, once we have chosen them.