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- 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
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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 3
Interviewee 2 3 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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She complained that the people from the first group often make tweets that she is not interested in, and they clutter up her feed making it harder to find posts of interest. Currently, she manually scans through the tweets, passing over the ones she does not want to read. She expressed interest in a tool that would filter out these posts leaving only posts from people she is interested in, and posts about articles that should be retweeted (possibly by scanning through posts from people in the first group, and removing any that do not link to articles). She commented that Tweetdeck used to provide this capability, but when Twitter bought it they either removed it or hid it somewhere.
Lessons Learned
- Things already done well for information overload (in social websites)
- Users can easily see posts from one person by following them (Twitter in this example, but this is also true on Facebook and Google+)
- Asking friends to repost something can make it spread virally
1. Social websites currently excel at showing people information from a given person.
2. They can also be used to spread information virally, by asking friends to repost something.
3. However, users can't easily apply granular, automatic filters (e. g. You can block all posts from one person, but blocking only some is harder). Twitter, Facebook, and Google may not want to implement a feature like - Things that are not done well
- Filtering out persons or posts automatically. Twitter/Facebook/Google may not want this; it would shorten the time users spend on their site sites exposed to advertisements - this indicates a need we could fill.