Summary
The researchers of this paper design an intuitive method for managing histories and attempted to enhance the ability of users to retrieve prior information. They were able to accomplish this by creating a concept which used a virtual wall where users could post post-it notes collaboratively.
Reflection
I couldn’t read this paper without thinking of Apple’s “TIme Machine” the entire time. I felt like Apple’s “Time Machine” captured a lot of the features that the researchers wanted to tackle such as management of histories and retrieval for users. Another tool that I felt like does the items the researchers were interested in is Github. The paper especially reminded me of Github when it started describing the concept of branches relating to history.
The project described in the paper may not be completely similar to my own project but it contains elements that may be helpful to include or factor into my project. The research talks about management of histories that can allow users to get more use out of their previous content which would enable them to create new, additional content. This content may be quite helpful in a note-taking app but perhaps not. Students don’t rely too heavily on previous notes to write new notes; instead, they rely on outside sources of information such as the instructor or textbook to take notes. On the other hand, the ability to retrieve historic information would be quite helpful. This is where I can draw ideas for my project from this paper.
The researchers gained input from designers which I thought was a great idea. It would have also been quite beneficial to gain additional input or feedback from people who would actually use such a system; so the end-users. I felt like the concept they had was a bit abstract. I think it would’ve been difficult to for users to understand the usability of this concept while using the post-it note concept. This is simply because most people (as far as I know) don’t actually use post-it notes on a public wall too often. I think another concept built around an action that is more popular such as document writing perhaps would’ve been more useful.
Overall I’m not quite sure I’m sold on the importance of the paper. I think if the paper used more relevant concepts that were more relatable to me, I would’ve appreciated the paper. I also found the paper to be much more abstract than any previous paper we’ve read so far.