Interview 1
- Twitter** Follows 600+ accounts** Keep general tabs on various groups of people/areas of interest* Phone interface is most natural** In the morning, scroll back as far as the client will go to catch up** Wouldn't want tweets going to e-mail because it's harder to Mark All as Read (don't want to miss out) than to be limited by Twitter's scroll-back history* Receives tweets from important people as text messages
- Favorites tweets she wants to revisit
- Occasionally would want a tweet via e-mail
- Google Reader** Doesn't want to think about how many unread items she has** Wants to split the feeds into Good and Meh (my words) so that she can regularly read the good without feeling bad about ignoring the meh
- E-mail** Uses e-mail as a TODO list (regretfully)** Would see tweets and RSS items as TODOs and doesn't want that* Sometimes, when she's expecting a stressful e-mail, she doesn't want to open her e-mail client at all
- Has never used an automatic filterer that worked well. She's the best judge of what she would find interesting and feels the investment is worth it.
Interview 2
Interviewee 2 is a graduate student. She reads information from a lot of sources, mainly Twitter, Facebook and 93 different RSS feeds via Google Reader (though many of these are comics and other things that aren’t quite news). She does most of her reading at home and at work, on her laptop and on her Kindle Fire.
She tries to get through all of the updates from her information sources, but almost never does. Whatever she doesn’t get through she marks as read to make room for more. However, she feels a twinge of guilt when she leaves items unread, and will read through things more quickly and with less care just to get through more information. Sometimes she feels she would enjoy it more if she took more time to read them thoroughly.
She has over 1000 friends on Facebook and has written over 10000 tweets, but still goes through all of the tweets/status updates in her feeds. Twitter is easier for her to keep up with because the tweets are short. However, between the two she only follows up on items she’s really interested in. Because she knows everyone she is friends with on Facebook, she does not unfriend people. However, she will stop following accounts on Twitter if they post high volumes of tweets with links she tends not to click through or people she finds uninteresting. She makes it a point to not unfriend or unfollow anyone she knows personally.
This year, she is giving up Twitter and Facebook for Lent.
Lessons Learned
- Some users feel compelled to consume all of their information, and are disappointed when they are unable to achieve this goal.
- There are users that have the problems we describe in our problem statement and would benefit greatly from our application, but do not use their phones to read information online (a group we primarily want to target)
- Users have a wide range of reasons for wanting to permanently/temporarily hide/remove some of their information sources, so we should probably make this feature easy/fast to do and undo## We may even want to let users dictate when to start/stop feeds through dates and times (like for Lent)
Interview 3
Interviewee 3 is a graduate student. He reads news from a wide range of sources, including email, reddit, hackernews, New York Times, TIME and various blogs. He surfs reddit and hackernews via their websites, accesses his email through gmail and reads his feeds via Google Reader. He consumes this information “everywhere except while showering,” which includes the office, home, cafes and while on the T. He spends half of this time on his laptop/desktop, and half on his phone.
He does not like using Twitter or Facebook. He even closed his Facebook account because he was annoyed with having to “see all this junk information” when trying to use it to connect with friends.
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.
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)
Interview 4
Interviewee 4 is a freelance journalist who regularly networks over the Web on sites like Facebook and Twitter to make her name more well-known. She stays connected to Web-based networks at home with her laptop, and on the go with her Android tablet. Her activity on Facebook is fairly typical, and she does not use Google+ regularly because most of her friends do not, but her usage of Twitter reflects a need which this project will try to fulfill.
There are two major reasons why she follows people on Twitter. The first is out of professional courtesy; a common practice in her profession is to follow colleagues and retweet their articles when they are posted. The implicit contract is that they will retweet your articles in return, improving the visibility of both parties. The second reason is out of genuine interest in their tweets.
She complained that the people from the first group often make tweets that she is not interested in, and they clutter up her feed making it harder to find posts of interest. Currently, she manually scans through the tweets, passing over the ones she does not want to read. She expressed interest in a tool that would filter out these posts leaving only posts from people she is interested in, and posts about articles that should be retweeted (possibly by scanning through posts from people in the first group, and removing any that do not link to articles). She commented that Tweetdeck used to provide this capability, but when Twitter bought it they either removed it or hid it somewhere.
Lessons Learned
1. Social websites currently excel at showing people information from a given person.
2. They can also be used to spread information virally, by asking friends to repost something.
3. However, users can't easily apply granular, automatic filters (e. g. You can block all posts from one person, but blocking only some is harder). Twitter, Facebook, and Google may not want to implement a feature like this; it would shorten the time users spend on their sites exposed to advertisements.