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User Analysis

  1. Students:
  • Age: mostly 17 - 30
  • Gender: Any
  • Culture: College students
  • Language: Any.
  • Education: College undergraduates and graduates
  • Physical limitations: Some of them have myopia
  • Computer experience: 5+ years of experience with using a computer; comfortable with keyboard and mouse
  • Motivation: Registered in a class, either to satisfy a curriculum requirement or to acquire useful knowledge for personal interest or future research.
  • Attitude: Ranges widely. Some wants to learn just enough information to do well on the problem sets and exams. Others have a mixed approach: if the class materials are interesting and unfamiliar, they will be willing to do a lot of work; otherwise, they will look for shortcuts to get an A.
  • Domain experience: Familiar with the idea of annotating a document; most of them have done it on paper materials at least. Often receive and share annotated paper materials that are either handed down from the professor or distributed among students.
  • Application experience: Ranges from none to having been annotating documents for 2+ years with Microsoft Office, Adobe or Google Doc.
  • Work environment and other social context: College environment, knows some friends in the class most of the time
  • Relationships and communication patterns with other people: Ranges from working alone to working in groups. When working alone, the user does not want to share all his information, but would like to ask input/inspiration from discussions with classmates occasionally. When working in groups, study is highly coordinated within the group; and ideas are constantly bounced back and forth among group members.
  1. Researchers:
    Note: the word “researcher” here is not to be interpreted in the usual academic sense. A researcher can be anyone with an expertise or even just an interest in a specific field, academic or not.
    1. age, gender, culture, language
    16+,
    Any,
    Need to extract and/or retrieve large amount of information in a specific field
    English.
    2. education (literacy? numeracy?)

Good literacy and numeracy. Mostly a professional that uses a computer most of the time during work. College education or an interest/expertise in a specialized field
3. physical limitations
None.
4. computer experience (typing? mouse?)
Some of them are proficient keyboard and mouse users. Elder ones tend to have less skills when it comes to computer operations such as using the control panel and dealing with the file system. Younger ones are better at dealing with computers such as using the control panel and configuring WiFi settings.
5. motivation, attitude
Navigating a web page to search for needed information:
Highly motivated if it’s work-related.
For taking notes while reading information on a web page:
If information is very relevant, will be very motivated to highlight it or extract it to save it somewhere else.
6. domain experience
They are highly familiar with the idea of saving information and preserving them either as an electronic copy in their computers or as a printed copy. They are also familiar with the idea of annotation and sharing of annotated material.
For example, one user often downloads funny pictures from the web, annotates them and then emails the results to friends. And another is a manager and she often pastes the information she found on the web in a Word document and sents them to her team.
7. application experience
Some of them have used Microsoft paint, Adobe Reader / Acrobat, Kindle, and some ipad apps for reading and annotating PDFs. Others haven’t used any annotation software or web service before. Not one of them knows there are tools for annotating webpages and they haven’t annotated webpages directly before. If they needs to annotate, they will convert the webpage to either a picture or a document (a Word documents or PDF).
Uses web browsers all the time. (IE is the most widely used for non-technical people, especially people who are not in the field of computer science.)
8. work environment and other social context
Most of them sits in front of a computer and uses it all day except meetings.
9. relationships and communication patterns with other people
They communicate by email, phone and in person. When sending emails, some of them use attachment a lot, attaching PDF, Excel, Word or PPT documents.

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