Tom
- Twitter** Follows 600+ accounts** * Keep general tabs on various groups of people/areas of interest* Phone interface is most natural
- In the morning, scroll back as far as the client will go to catch up*** Wouldn't want tweets going to e-mail because it's harder to Mark All as Read (don't want to miss out) than to be limited by Twitter's scroll-back history
- Receives tweets from important people as text messages
- Favorites tweets she wants to revisit
- Occasionally would want a tweet via e-mail
- Google Reader** Doesn't want to think about how many unread items she has** Wants to split the feeds into Good and Meh (my words) so that she can regularly read the good without feeling bad about ignoring the meh
- E-mail** Uses e-mail as a TODO list (regretfully)** * Would see tweets and RSS items as TODOs and doesn't want that* Sometimes, when she's expecting a stressful e-mail, she doesn't want to open her e-mail client at all
- Has never used an automatic filterer that worked well. She's the best judge of what she would find interesting and feels the investment is worth it.
Leilani
Interview 1
Interviewee 1 is a graduate student. She reads information from a lot of sources, mainly Twitter, Facebook and 93 different RSS feeds via Google Reader (though many of these are comics and other things that aren’t quite news). She does most of her reading at home and at work, on her laptop and on her Kindle Fire.
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- Some users feel compelled to consume all of their information, and are disappointed when they are unable to achieve this goal.
- There are users that have the problems we describe in our problem statement and would benefit greatly from our application, but do not use their phones to read information online (a group we primarily want to target)
- Users have a wide range of reasons for wanting to permanently/temporarily hide/remove some of their information sources, so we should probably make this feature easy/fast to do and undo## We may even want to let users dictate when to start/stop feeds through dates and times (like for Lent)
Interview 2
Interviewee 2 is a graduate student. He reads news from a wide range of sources, including email, reddit, hackernews, New York Times, TIME and various blogs. He surfs reddit and hackernews via their websites, accesses his email through gmail and reads his feeds via Google Reader. He consumes this information “everywhere except while showering,” which includes the office, home, cafes and while on the T. He spends half of this time on his laptop/desktop, and half on his phone.
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- Users want to be able to identify the most useful information as soon as possible (hence why Interviewee 2 does not like Facebook or Twitter, and utilizes the front page of reddit)
- Not all users feel overwhelmed by their high-volume information streams, so our application should reflect this
- Though users may have too much to read, they don’t want to have too little## We should allow users to adjust this quickly and on the fly## example: when a user checks in with our application to consume some information, she runs out of things to read. So she adjusts her preferences to increase the amount of information she sees and our application immediately adds previously unseen items to her visible updates.
- Our application would be most beneficial if users could access it on their computers and on the phone## We discussed this and for the scope of the class we will focus primarily on use via phone (but will more than likely have to make sure users can access it comfortably via computer)
Rahul
Interview 3 (a journalist managing information from social networks)
Interviewee 3 is a freelance journalist who regularly networks over the Web on sites like Facebook and Twitter to make her name more well-known. She stays connected to Web-based networks at home with her laptop, and on the go with her Android tablet. Her activity on Facebook is fairly typical, and she does not use Google+ regularly because most of her friends do not, but her usage of Twitter reflects a need which this project will try to fulfill.
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