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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” things due to users voting these items up). Otherwise, he quickly skims headlines and ignores what he thinks is not important.
Update: Interviewee 3 would like the ability to "star" items, similar to Gmail, and in general wants to be able to mark things he finds important for quick/easy access later. However, it does not matter to him whether items are stored physically in a separate location or not. He spends 30-60 minutes reading/managing information sources, and most of this time is spent reading information (not managing it). He quickly skims items and only reads in-depth what he finds interesting, which keeps the time required to look for interesting information down. He feels that there is a clear trend in the articles he reads, but he doesn't trust a system enough to recommend new sources to him. He feels that he alone is his own best judge of interesting information, and thus relies on this to find things to read.
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## We should allow users to adjust this quickly and on the fly## example: 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## 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)
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