Information Assimilation in the Digital Age: Developing Support for Web-Based Notetaking Tasks

Yolanda Jacobs Reimer

As users turn to the World Wide Web to accomplish an increasing variety of daily tasks, many engage in Information Assimilation (IA), a process I define as the gathering, editing, annotating, organizing, and saving of Web information, and the tracking of ongoing Web work processes. Usability must be a major priority in the development of interactive systems to support IA. The term IA emerges from a number of background studies presented in this dissertation, including a review of the most important literature on notetaking and an ethnographic field study of how a group of biologists routinely engages in the process of notetaking. Despite evidence suggesting that Information Assimilation is critical to many Web users, a review of existing software applications indicates that it is currently not well supported. This leads to important new research questions: Why hasn't adequate IA software been developed yet? and Are software solutions possible? To explore answers to these questions, I created a \Veb-based electronic notebook called NetNotes based on functional requirements derived from the initial background studies. Implementation of the NetNotes prototype highlights technical and user-centered design challenges associated with developing software for the Web, and also demonstrates that limited solutions to the problem of supporting IA do exist. Furthermore, NetNotes proves robust enough for use in an experiment to determine the extent to which it is an improvement over existing applications. In the final phase of this research, a betweensubjects experimental evaluation of 20 scientific notetakers was conducted to ascertain how participants complete a set of IA tasks using the NetNotes prototype versus using their normal software applications. The experiment revealed that NetNotes users were significantly more productive completing certain tasks than participants who used their normal software (i.e., the control group), and that NetNotes users felt as though they had to expend significantly less effort than the control group to complete certain tasks. Nevertheless, no significant differences were discovered between the NetNotes group and the control group in terms of user satisfaction; additionally, for other sets of tasks, the differences in productivity and cognitive effort also were not significant.