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Interviewee 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.
He does not like using Twitter or Facebook. He even closed his Facebook account because he was annoyed with having to “see all this junk information” when trying to use it to connect with friends.
Despite the high volume of information he receives on a regular basis, Interviewee 2 is not frustrated by his inability to consume it all. In fact, he prefers it because it ensures he always has something to do when he’s bored. He lets some of his resources do the work of finding what’s interesting, such as sticking to the front page of reddit (which has a large number of “interesting” interesting things due to users voting these items up). Otherwise, he quickly skims headlines and ignores what he thinks is not important.
Lessons Learned
- 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
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- We should allow users to adjust this quickly and on the fly
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- . For example
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- , 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
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- 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)
h2. Interview 4
Interviewee 4 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.
There are two major reasons why she follows people on Twitter. The first is out of professional courtesy; a common practice in her profession is to follow colleagues and retweet their articles when they are posted. The implicit contract is that they will retweet your articles in return, improving the visibility of both parties. The second reason is out of genuine interest in their tweets.
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