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Pre-condition: all tasks require Internet connection on a computer.
1. Goal: Annotate a webpage and/or retrieve the annotated version fast at a later time
- Subtasks:
Annotation: edit, highlight, putting notes, etc.
Retrieval: the retrieved annotated version of the webpage should be similar to the old one
- Environment: Potentially anywhere. Top locations reported by interviewees are libraries, dorm rooms and home
- Frequency of use: varied. Interviewees’ response ranges from once daily to once every 3 months.
- Time constraint: Highly efficiently UI to enable to fast annotation (within a few seconds) and fast retrieval
- Resource constraint: Usable on a mobile platform. One interviewee reported that he frequently annotates e-books on Kindle
- Risk: Users may lose Internet connection when annotating a webpage. Thus our system should be fault tolerant.
- Example: Highlight important sentences and make notes in a Wikipedia article for later reference.
2. Goal: Let other people view one’s annotated webpage.
- Subtasks: publish annotated webpages, notify target users
- Environment: Potentially anywhere. One interviewee reported workspace
- Frequency of use: varied.
- Time constraint: Published annotation should be viewable by others in a minute or less
- Risk: Users may lose Internet connection when annotating a webpage. Thus our system should be fault tolerant.
- Example: sharing annotated webpages with co-workers
3. Goal: View & edit other people’s annotations.
- Subtasks: Open existing annotations and possibly edit them
- Environment: Potentially anywhere. Top locations reported by interviewees are libraries, dorm rooms and home
- Frequency of use: varied. Interviewees’ response ranges from once daily to once every 3 months.
- Time constraint: Should be easy to open existing annotations within 10 seconds
- Resource constraint: Usable on a mobile platform
- Risk: Users may lose Internet connection when viewing annotation. Ideally the displayed annotations should remain
- Implication: should display only a subset of the annotations by other users if there are many, in order to avoid information overload
- Example: Aggregating annotations by multiple users on a webpage and display a high-quality combined version to users wishing to view and possibly improve it, e.g. students taking 6.813 may wish to view others’ annotations on course website
Because of the special nature of the last task, its analysis deviates somewhat from the previous ones.
4. Goal: Save a copy of the current webpage
- Example/Current practice: One of our interviewee copies and pastes useful text she finds on a webpage into a Word document if she wants to keep it. She is under the impression that webpages change all the time and fast. She is worried that if she just bookmarks/saves the page, it will likely disappear next time she opens it.
- Environment: Potentially anywhere
- Frequency of use: varied. One interviewee reported daily.
- SPECIAL NOTE: while most web browsers already support this functionality, our interviewees' response indicate that they lack the correct model in their mind and that they are not happy to have a folder containing html files, pictures, and other files. They'd like to have a more organized and systematic way to save webpages.