...
- They access the Internet using a smartphone and/or computer. Using the Internet to consume information is common over computer, but the use of smartphones is less so. These users are willing to pay additional money to gain the ability to consume data on the go: first, by buying a smartphone instead of a cheaper feature phone; and second, by purchasing a data plan from a carrier, which has wider coverage than Wi-Fi, but costs more for the same amount of data. The most extreme cases use unlimited data plans and resist carriers' attempts to move them over to limited plans. Overall, they make substantial effort to be able to consume information at any time.
- They are interested in staying up-to-date using information streams with more content than they are willing/able to read. These information streams include, but are not limited to, status updates (published to followers) on social websites like Facebook, Twitter, and Google+, social news with comments on aggregators (available to everyone) such as Reddit and Hacker News, RSS feeds, and targetted messages (only available to parties enumerated by the sender) like email and private messages on Facebook. A key idea is that they demand information from a large array of sources: a person who only uses the Internet for email would not derive much utiltity from our project.
The population can be divided into two classes based on how they deal with information overload; this problem can be defined as one having more information available than one is able to read in a reasonable time-frame (e.g. before the information becomes outdated or invalidated by new information).
- People People who are overwhelmed. When they consume information over the web, they flip through all the sources they are interested in
...
- and read what they can, until they run out of time and have to fulfill other obligations. They may miss out on information that might be interesting to them, because they were busy reading other data in the time available. They realize that this situation is not optimal, but they do not have an easy method of improving it.
- People who attempt action to bring the information influx under control. One method is to "whitelist" sources of information and avoid subscribing to information sources that are less relevant. A user practicing this with blogs might add a subset to an RSS feed, and read only the information from the feed. Another is to consciously evaluate all information sources from a first impression, and skip over datums that are not interesting. For example, one user skipped over tweets from certain people (see Interview 4 for more detail). The ad hoc nature of these "filters" leads to inefficiencies and user dissatisfaction. The RSS feed approach is not fully generalized (e.g. it doesn't include tweets or Facebook status updates) and offers no guidance in areas outside its scope. Manually picking out information to read is also inefficient, and could be automated if the user follows a set of rules.
Task Analysis
We consider 6 high-level tasks related to our problem, 3 essential and 3 non-essential. We list the three non-essential tasks as a reminder that they still need to be implemented, even if they are not significant.
...