However, it is becoming clear that the use of animation in actively attracting attention or passively delivering information is a complicated matter by itself and a theory is expected from a seperate research project. Specifically, people have argued that if the transition time from a displayed article to a new one is very short, the transition may not attract much attention as we thought it would.
More importantly, the ability of being able to directly interact with other people may have a strong influence on whether the tool will be used or not. Therefore, we will focus on the interaction support and leave animations as user-selectable options.
A big challenge is to support the functionalities of news delivery and short chat sessions in a small screen space. We illustrate one possible design in the following scenario.
He quickly read over the first few lines of the news article and finds that this is about an invited talk at noon and it seems interesting. Realizing that it's only 5 minutes till the talk starts, he leaves his cubicle to attend the talk.
(an hour later...)
Joe returns to his desk and wonders what is happening in the on-line chat
channels. He pushes the "Chat" button and sees a list of channels. The
first two channels are flagged, suggesting that they are most likely
interesting to him and there are recent activities in those channels. The
channel at the bottom of the list looks old and has probably had no
activity for some time.
Being a Linux fan and sensing that Linux-related words appear in the second
chat channel, Joe decides to watch this channel and see what exactly people
are talking about. He clicks on the plus button to expand this channel. Not
feeling the urge to add anything to the discussion, he returns to the
document he was editing before.
, whether cycle through all articles
automatically or not 
, or to skip to the next article
.
The second column of buttons, sets the scope of
forwarding/backwarding/cycling actions: news 
, chat
channels 
, or both.
The picture is selected by the tool as the most appropriate to describe the content of the article or chat channel. In the most simplistic approach, it's a picture of the related person in the article or the person who posted the last comment in the chat channel.
If the text area displays a list of items, clicking on the item or the in front of it brings up the details of that item. Clicking
on the
in the details brings back the list.
If the text area displays a news article, it includes the title of the article in bold face, several lines of details about the article, a link to the full-length article Web page (if one exists), and a link to the chat area. Following the chat link will create a new chat channel if one related to the current news article does not alreay exist.
If the text area displays a chat channel, it shows the content of the chat room with an input area in end of the scrollable region. The number of characters that can be entered is limited by the width of the text entry widget, encouraging short sentences in the chat channel. User can enter special commands in a chat channel to, for example, email the content of the chat channel to oneself, or invite other people to join.
The question mark button 
on the top-right corner
allows access to the help document, application configuration, and advanced
features such as setting keywords of interests for filtering news articles
and chat channels.
Spring'99
Copyright © 1999 Q. Alex
Zhao, All Rights Reserved.