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This level of interest in information from the Internet is seen in many demographics. Most users in this group are well-educated, and spend a lot of time in front of a computer screen. It is not uncommon for them to surreptiously read information feeds at work in between tasks related to their job, or use information consumption as a method of procrastinating.
The Our user 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more information available than one is able to read in a reasonable time-frame (e.g. before the information becomes outdated or invalidated by new information).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 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. For example, Interviewee 2 feels guilty when marking all the items she couldn't get to as read each day. She also told us that she would probably enjoy the experience more if she read fewer items in depth, rather than as many as possible. Users we spoke to who fell in this class expressed the 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 interviewee 4 skips over tweets from certain people (see Interview 4 for more detail), and interviewee 2 completely removed his Facebook account. 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.
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