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User Analysis

There are two main characteristics of our user population:

  1. They access the Internet using a smart phone and/or computer.
  2. They are interested in staying up-to-date using information streams with more content than they are willing/able to read.

We noticed several people who do not consider themselves part of the group described by #2 because they don’t feel overwhelmed. They keep things under control by vigorously unsubscribing and unfollowing---or, viewed another way, undersubscribing and underfollowing. We think that they might still benefit from a system that allowed them to review more data with the same amount of effort.

Task Analysis

We consider 6 high-level tasks related to our problem. Three compose the central experience: reading, filtering, and configuring the display. The other three are required for our interface to be used with third-party services: identifying themselves to our service, initial setup, and managing connections to third-party information sources.

Reading

Besides viewing the content, users also need to be able to organize the content (such as with tags or a directory structure), and control the lifetime of the content (marking items as read, marking as “read later,” etc).

  • Why is the task being done? The user wants to know what’s going on in their world.
  • What does the user need to know or have before doing the task? That what they’re about to read is likely to be interesting/useful
  • Where is the task performed? in a smart phone’s web browser, potentially on the go
  • What is the environment like? Noisy, dirty, dangerous? potentially
  • How often is the task performed? Within a session, repeatedly and rapidly, and they may have several sessions per day
  • What are its time resource constraints? As fast as possible (as quickly as a few seconds), but perhaps lasting several minutes for longer content
  • How is the task learned? in situ
  • What can go wrong? accidentally lose the item they just read and having to find it again
  • Who else is involved in the task? no one

Filtering

Users will often be interested in only a subset of information (written by a specific person or persons, or covering a certain topic)* Why is the task being done? The user wants to restrict the given information to that subset.

  • What does the user need to know or have before doing the task? They need to be logged in, and know enough about the subset to describe it or pick a filter.
  • Where is the task performed? Either on a desktop/laptop, or on a phone browser.
  • What is the environment like? Noisy, dirty, dangerous? It could be, if the user is on the go with their smartphone or tablet.
  • How often is the task performed? This depends on the user’s profile; some may do it all the time, others only once or twice per session.
  • What are its time resource constraints? The feedback loop should ideally be less than a minute so refining the filter is easy.
  • How is the task learned? The user can learn it by recognition; we plan to design the interface so its controls are very similar to Google Instant search or other similar mechanisms.
  • What can go wrong? The filter could be incorrect (too broad or narrow), or it could have a typo. A fast feedback loop will improve safety by ameliorating these issues.
  • Who else is involved in the task? No one else in this case.’
  • What subtasks are there? Navigating to the textbox (or other form element used for filtering, entering the author name or topic to keep (or reusing an old filter), scanning the subset displayed, and revising the input if needed. Optionally, users could save the filter for future usage.

Configuring the Display

We anticipate that one interface will not fit all, so we will need controls for display settings like changing the font face and size. This will be more important in the phone interface than on the desktop, where browsers expose convenient settings for the font size.

  • Why is the task being done? The user cannot read our interface comfortably
  • What does the user need to know or have before doing the task? That they are uncomfortable, and that settings are available
  • Where is the task performed? in a web browser on a phone or PC
  • What is the environment like? Noisy, dirty, dangerous? potentially
  • How often is the task performed? ideally only once
  • What are its time resource constraints? none
  • How is the task learned? in situ
  • What can go wrong? an inappropriate option is chosen that doesn’t improve readability
  • Who else is involved in the task? no one

Initial Setup

Users will need to be able to specify what information they want to manage using our interface, preferably as quickly and easily as their existing techniques.

  • Why is the task being done? So that we know what they want to read
  • What does the user need to know or have before doing the task? What sources they want to add, and their authentication information
  • Where is the task performed? in a smart phone’s web browser, potentially on the go
  • What is the environment like? Noisy, dirty, dangerous? yes
  • How often is the task performed? once per information source
  • What are its time resource constraints? fast (less than a minute)
  • How is the task learned? in situ
  • What can go wrong? forgot password, typo. don’t know what the service is or how to add it (ex: RSS feeds). want to add a source that we don’t support.
  • Who else is involved in the task? the 3rd party in question

Identity Creation and Authentication

To store user information remotely, we need users to create an identity for our application and provide authentication information to identify themselves in the future.

  • Why is the task being done? So we can identify the user and thus save state in our application for that user’s preferences/updates/etc.
  • What does the user need to know or have before doing the task? How they would like to identify themselves and authenticate their identity (like what user name and password they want to use)
  • Where is the task performed? in a smart phone or computer web browser, potentially on the go
  • What is the environment like? Noisy, dirty, dangerous? The environment could be noisy and have many people around. It could be indoors or out.
  • How often is the task performed? Once per user (hopefully)
  • What are its time resource constraints? Should be fast, about a minute
  • How is the task learned? By doing, but we should be able to rely on affordances
  • What can go wrong? The user inputs their desired identity/authentication incorrectly (lik the wrong user name or password)
  • Who else is involved in the task? no one.

Managing 3rd-Party Connections

After setup is complete and the app is being used, there are still actions that the user may want to take regarding our connections to the third-party services, such as remove them, pause their use (temporarily stop reading items from them), and configure how often updates are pulled.

  • Why is the task being done? The user has a problem with how our software interacts with a third-party service and needs to change its behavior
  • What does the user need to know or have before doing the task? that something is wrong, that they can fix it by changing settings, and how to access the settings
  • Where is the task performed? in a web browser on a phone or PC
  • What is the environment like? Noisy, dirty, dangerous? potentially
  • How often is the task performed? infrequently, probably only a handful of times for every few months of use
  • What are its time resource constraints? none
  • How is the task learned? in situ
  • What can go wrong? a service is accidentally disabled, the user forgets that a service is enabled, or some setting is set to an inappropriate value
  • Who else is involved in the task? no one

Interviews

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

  1. Some users feel compelled to consume all of their information, and are disappointed when they are unable to achieve this goal.
  2. 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)
  3. 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

  1. 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)
  2. Not all users feel overwhelmed by their high-volume information streams, so our application should reflect this
  3. 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.
  4. 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.
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