Haystack Blog

Last April we presented results at CHI 2009 about how people used List-It, our open source Firefox plugin when it was released in September 2008.  Since this initial study, we’ve had quite a few more users – we just hit our 13,000th registered account on September 1st, 2009!  More importantly, more than 600 people have given us permission to analyze their notes for science, which has made it possible to discover interesting trends. Here are some initial findings from purely looking at note statistics:

• Memory triggers (reminders) are important – from a randomly selected subset of the notes we examined, 58% were primarily memory triggers, a general term that refers to notes like to-dos and reminders that serve a primary purpose of calling your attention to something.
• Memory triggers are easy to identify but not to interpret – when people other than a note’s author are shown a memory trigger note, there’s strong agreement (consensus) identifying it as such (k=0.77, N=2500). However, they’re difficult to interpret than other note types because of their brevity and ambiguity. For example, the note “lincoln park” might be a memory trigger, but it is not clear its interpretation: does the author have to go to Lincoln Park, in Chicago? Is it a reference requiring context, such as a name of a book to read? Is it a reminder to listen to the band Linkin Park?
• Shorter notes are deleted more quickly than longer notes – This is likely because short notes often represent memory-triggers which are often discarded after use, whereas longer notes tend to be reference items and items kept for posterity.
• Bookmarking – Notes containing URLs contain little text modifying them – 36% contained only the URL; the median number of words per-note with URL was 2.
• Copy and paste from the web – A significant number of individuals regularly copy and paste entire fragments of web pages, e-mails, and even spreadsheets into their notes for safekeeping.  These kinds of notes account for the majority of notes which are over 200 words long and which are kept for more than a month.
• There seem to be are two types of people – keepers and deleters.  Although the statistics here aren’t extremely significant, the distribution of percentage of notes people delete has peaks at around 30% and above 90%.  This implies that most people delete a small fraction of their notes, while others delete most of their notes.  An initial inspection reveals that this latter category are people who use List-It primarily as a to-do manager (and delete notes when they’re done).
• Searches to personal note collections were very infrequent but repeated – The median number of searches people performed over a one month period of usage was 5, (min: 0: max: 122).  Among the searches, 60.2% constituted repeated searches (searches that had been done at least once before on a separate occasion).  Interestingly and not surprisingly, the most frequently searched term was “todo”.

Based on interviews and surveys with participants, we also arrived with the following conclusions:

• List-It was used to permanently keep track of a number of different kinds of information.  Instead of being merely a temporary resting place, interviewees mentioned that they kept most (if not all) of certain kinds of information permanently in List-It.  The kinds of information that participants most often cited keeping entirely in list-it were: 1) Ideas and brainstorming. 2) Text copied and pasted from the web. 3) Short-term to-do reminders. 4) Things to look up some day.
• Ease of creating and accessing notes in List-It were its most valued attributes. A majority of users rated  “Much easier” (1) to write information down in than other tools they used (on a 7-point scale), and “Somewhat easier” to look things up in than their other tools.

We are currently in the process of preparing a paper describing these results in detail; please stay tuned and we’ll announce when this is available.  But we think that these results immediately suggest ways that we think we can improve how well List-It works for people.  First, since speed and ease of use were important, we plan to work on making List-It more easily accessible directly from places outside the browser, and to let users directly add links to their List-Its by pressing a single hotkey/button.  Second, due to the importance of reminding, we plan to investigate ways to add reminding to List-It such that it will effectively show people notes at appropriate times. More on this later!