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Briefing

WebAnnotator is a web application that allows users to annotate web-pages and to share the annotated pages with trusted parties. Standard annotating capabilities such as commenting and highlighting are supported.

For example, a student taking a class can annotate course materials that are on the Internet and share his notes with his friends. WebAnnotator greatly facilitates this annotation and sharing process by providing an efficient user interface.

There will be four different tasks in this testing.

Scenario Tasks

• Task One: Your user name is Jin and your password is 1234. Use WebAnnotator (http://webannotator.com) to annotate the webpage, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(programming_language)\
  1. Highlight the first sentence "Lisp(historically, LISP) is a family of computer...".
  2. Add a note saying "Awesome!" to the picture of LISP machine.
• Task Two: Save, Review Saved & Reopen
  1. Save the annotated webpage.
  2. See all your saved pages. (Suppose you have saved two other pages before. So in total you now have three saved pages.)
  3. Open the one you just saved.
• Task Three: Share your annotated Wikipedia article on LISP with Alex (user name: alex, email: alex@gmail.com) so that it is viewable by Alex, but he cannot change anything on it.
• Task Four: Collaborative Edit with Another User
  1. Share your page with Sam (user name: same, email: sam@gmail.com) to allow him to edit at the same time on the page.
  2. Highlight the person that first implemented Lisp (Steve Russel, in the 4th paragraph of "History").
  3. Change your previous note on the picture from "Awesome!" to "Broken."

Special Note: For Task four #2 above, druing the first 10 seconds, a tag saying "Sam" is shown near this paragraph, indicating that another user is currently annotating this. Any other user thus won't be able to edit or add annotations until Sam has finished. This was only simulated in real time and was not included in the task card given to the tester so that the testing better approximates the actual application.

Observations

First Iteration

1. User One:
   • Confused the icon for popup note with highlight.
   • Unable to scroll down to locate the LISP machine picture because a scroll bar was missing from the prototype.
   • Task four #2: the simulating doesn't work very well as the user didn't understand why he couldn't annotate while the tag "Sam" is present.
   • All other tasks successfully completed with ease.
   • Suggested to support annotation deletion.
2. User Two:
   • Confused the icon for popup note with highlight.
   • Not sure how to save popup note (even though it's automatically saved).
   • Not sure clicking on "Jim" will bring him back to the Summary Page (but still did it anyway).
   • Not sure what "privilege" means (even though it's not required to complete tasks).
   • Task four #2: somewhat confused; not sure why annotating doesn't work.
   • All other tasks successfully completed with ease.
   • Suggested that annotation tools need improvement in general, e.g. icon for popup note is not clear, highlight doesn't support multiple colors, great if can drag annotations around.
3. User Three:
   • Confused about annotation icons.
   • Tried to click on a pre-existent hyperlink on the annotated webpage; and was expecting to see a new page opening up in a separate tab.
   • Thought the word "publish" implied the meaning of broadcasting to the entire world (instead of selectively sharing).
   • All other tasks successfully completed with ease.
   • Suggested that saved webpages in Summary Page should be organized in a list (i.e., how emails are organized by Google) to save space. Organizing them by thumbnails is difficult to search if there are many saved pages.

Second Iteration

1. User One:
   • Clicked the highlight icon to leave this mode in Task 1 even though clicking the popup note icon right away will already do the job.
   • All other tasks successfully completed with ease.
   • Suggested that collaborators' information (e.g., names) should be displayed on the top bar.
2. User Two:
   • To accomplish the sub-task of highlighting, tried to select the text first (the right order is first clicking the "highlight" button and then selecting the desired text).
   • Not sure clicking on "Jim" will bring him back to the Summary Page (but still did it anyway).
   • All other tasks successfully completed with ease.
   • Suggested that collaborators' information (e.g., names) should be displayed on the top bar.
   • Suggested that the cursor can change to indicate the current mode (highlight, popup notes, etc.)
3. User Three:
   • Scroll bar not visible enough as he could not locate the LISP machine picture.
   • Was expecting to see user profile information after clicking the button "Jim."
   • Was annoyed that there was no feedback (e.g., an pop-up message) when he tried to annotate over another user's section in collaboration mode and did not succeed.
   • All other tasks successfully completed with ease.
   • Suggested that the user should also be able to share from the homepage, without the intermediate process of opening the saved pages.
   • Pointed out that our current interface looks like a browser and the functionality should hence be consistent with this affordance. But our application currently does not support most of the standard browser functionality.

Prototype Iteration