By Jonas Sota

Context

Athena is a chrome extension for highlighting text and taking notes on web pages and PDFs in the browser. Highlights and notes are automatically organized into one place, accessible through a web app.

Problem

User interviews surfaced that some users, particularly users in academia, wanted a list of all of their highlights and notes. At the time, only a list of article cards that could be expanded by a click to display associated highlights and notes was available.

List of Articles (Article Cards)

Questions

1. Should the app support both a highlights view and articles view?

2. Would more users be better served if a highlights view was prioritized?

3. In the highlights view, should highlights be organized by their time of creation, or should they be bunched with other highlights of the same article?

Design Goals and Constraints

1. Time: Users spend as little time as possible re-finding saved content: they usually find any article, highlight, or note in their collection within 15 seconds of loading the app, and at most spend 30 seconds.
2. Energy: Users don't need to spend energy on re-finding saved content: they immediately understand how to find any article, highlight, or note within 15 seconds after their first use.