...
- 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. Users we spoke to who fell in this class expressed the desire for a way to enhance their online experience.
- 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; users would prefer to delegate repetitive work to the computer instead of doing it themselves. Users in this class were interested in a more sophisticated solution.
A related problem to information overload is the need to remember specific data and refer to them in the future. As the feeds a user subscribes to increases, it becomes harder to find a data remembering mechanism that handles all of them. The existing solutions users use are not complete. Some users may bookmark pages, but information tagged in this was does not propagate across devices, and most users do not organize it well. In addition, some information feeds are not amenable to bookmarking; for instance, you can't immediately bookmark a specific post on your Facebook news feed, and you would have to find a direct link to the post first. Another common mechanism is the use of email as a TODO list, but this requires manual filtering when the todo emails get mixed with messages from others.
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.
...