With the growth of the Web as a public information resource, users need workspaces to support the collection, evaluation, organization, and annotation of the materials they retrieve. These analytic workspaces should be designed for both the casual and professional analyst, keeping in mind that different environments may be appropriate for each type of use. In this paper, we derive a set of requirements from observations and reports on the use of information workspaces, coupled with observations of people performing analytical tasks. These workspace requirements include: (1) support for performing multiple simultaneous tasks; (2) a variety of activity-based connections to information resources; (3) tailorable and manipulable reduced document representations; and (4) visualizations to help users manage screen space. We explore the trade-offs implied by these requirements using our implementation of multiple focus fisheye views as we have integrated them into the VIKI workspace.
Frank M. Shipman III, Catherine C. Marshall, Mark