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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: None
   • 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.
     
     
2. 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.
   • Age: 16+
   • Gender: Any
   • Culture:
     Varies. Could be working professionals who need specific information related to their field of expertise or laymen searching for a field of their personal interests.
   • Language: Any
   • Education:
     Good literacy and numeracy, enough for finding specific information online by searching in a reasonable amount of time. Mostly a professional that uses a computer most of the time during work. College education or an interest/expertise in a specialized field
   • Physical limitations: None.
   • Computer experience:
     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.
   • Motivation and attitude:
     They are highly motivated to search the web if the information they are trying to find is very important to them.
     They are highly motivated to take notes or extract it to save it somewhere else if they want to review it later or send it to others.
   • 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.
   • 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).
     They use 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.)
   • Work environment and other social context:
     Most of them sits in front of a computer and uses it all day except meetings.
   • 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 Powerpoint documents.

Task Analysis

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.