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The URL box does not give enough affordance to indicate that a URL is needed. Moreover, finding the URL for the page to be annotated typically requires users to google for the page and then copy & paste the URL, making our interface less efficient.

Implement auto-complete for the string supplied in the text box. For instance, the auto-complete entries may be fetched from the results returned by googling the supplied string.

Editing Pages

It may take some time for new users to realize that the annotation bar appears upon highlighting.

Display a visible message like "Highlight text to annotate" at the top so that new users will immediately be aware of this.

It is non-trivial to discover that the delete button shows up upon clicking an existing annotation.

Make the delete button appear as well when the cursor hovers over the annotated text. Hopefully it will improve the visibility and discoverability of the button.

Some users are not aware of the auto-save feature and overlooked the message "All changes saved" in the top left corner.

Move the message to the middle to make it more visible and noticeable. Change the color of the message font to a more prominent color like red.

Internal hyperlinks (i.e. links that bring the screen to a certain location of the same webpage) are disabled.

Enable internal hyperlinks since the reason to disable hyperlinks is to make sure the user doesn't accidentally go to an external website (and possibly lose their annotations). Navigating the same page through hyperlinks do not suffer from this problem.

For the share dialog box, our current implementation saves a newly added viewer/editor only if the "plus" button is pressed. But this is externally inconsistent with most applications which do not require the pressing of the button.

Add the new viewer/editor even if the "plus" button is not pressed. To avoid the disadvantage of accidentally giving access to another user (as some may think that he is not added if the button is not pressed), one solution is to ask the user to confirm the list of viewers/editors to be added when the "done" button is pressed.

Dashboard

The search box does not implement substring search. This makes WebAnnotator less efficient to use as it requires users to remember a prefix of the title instead of any word in it. It violates the principle "recall, not remember".

Implement substring search.

The search box does not provide enough affordance for its functionality. A user tried to use it by entering the URL of a previously annotated page.

Provide more affordance by, for example, displaying the message "enter title keyword" (that is grayed out and will disappear once the search box gains focus).