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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. There are two methods of handling this issue:
- Don't use technology to remember data; instead track it all mentally. People with good memories may find success with this approach, but it still requires a fair amount of overhead.
- Use existing technological solutions. 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.
In total, there are four classes of users, comprising all possible combinations of approaches taken in the information overload problem and the archiving problem.
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.
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