Southampton: Computer post-it note developed

Researchers at the University of Southampton and Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) have developed a computing application that could replace the Post-it note.

Dr MC Schraefel of the University’s School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS) is working with MIT researchers on a project that aims to see computers being as easy to use as Post-it notes.

The researchers have developed List.It, which aims to be a lightweight interface to let people capture notes on a computer as effortlessly as writing a sticky note and to allow the researchers to get a better understanding of how people take notes.

Office spaces adorned with sticky notes of all colours and illegibility are very common, but the research team, led by David Karger of MIT’s CSAIL (Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab) and by Dr Schraefel of the ECS Intelligence, Agents, Multimedia group, wondered why the kinds of information scraps which the notes were used for were staying on paper rather than making it into a computer.

Researchers in the group, including PhD students Michael Bernstein and Max Van Kleek, undertook a study of the use of Post-its in an office environment and came up with a number of reasons why the actual physical object of a sticky note would be preferable in certain contexts to a computer program. They found that one of the main reasons for using Post-its was ease of use and time taken to make the note.

“Too often the computer gets in the way of what a person wants to do” says David Karger. “That’s right” says dr schraefel; “We can quickly jot ‘meeting at 5 with Max Tues’ on a Post-it and the job is done; the reminder is there.

“However, to do this same task on a computer means opening a program, filling in a bunch of fields in a form, navigating an interface to pick calendar dates or time ranges to make it easy for the computer to phrase what we mean.

“The cost of these actions can be perceived to be too high for the value of the note. So we don’t bother and we lose stuff. We want to eliminate that kind of interaction - Kill the form. Design software to support how we work, rather than have us continue to work for the computer” explained Schraefel.

The next extension of this approach will be to let people use List.It to say things like ‘Remind me about this paper the next time I’m with my boss’ and have the computer bring up that document at the right time and place. “We want to explore this kind of lightweight interaction as a way to get the computer to provide more support for less effort,” he added.

List.it is available at http://groups.csail.mit.edu/haystack/listit/ (requires Firefox) and users are asked to send in their comments on the code after using it.