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- Making edit buttons just above cursor saves the user the distance she has to move the cursor. It works especially well if the user is constantly switching editing tools. On the other hand, it may get tedious when the user is only using highlighting, and has to select the highlight tool every time after selecting text, which results in one more click per highlighting action. Making the most recent selected tool last until explicitly cancelled (by right click, for example) may help, but back to learnability, the knowledge of 'right click to cancel current active tool' needs to be learned somehow.
- In the collaborative or publish mode editing page (screen 4), the interface does not provide a summary of all edits and the user they belong to, the user has to select an edit to see its user. Which might be inefficient when the user wants to view just a single person's edits, or the differences between her edits and others'.
- No undo or history of previous actions are provided, so the user cannot easily undo their previous delete without finding them explicitly all over the page.
- In the dashboard page (Screen 3), the saved pages are displayed as thumbnails, which may not be efficient for multiple deletion, partly because it is not as compact as a list. A list with a check box may provide better efficiency for aggregate operations, but they may be lacking visual cues to help the user recall a saved page.
Safety:
- Displaying the original webpage's URL at the top right is very much like the web browser's address bar, which may confuse the user about her current location and create an illusion that she is actually on the original webpage. If the user follows a link on the original page, either because she thinks that the new page will also open in WebAnnotator or by accident, she will be redirected to the new page, exiting WebAnnotator, which may be unexpected and risks the user to lose her work on WebAnnotator if it is not saved. A prompt on redirection asking for confirmation ('By clicking on a link you are about to leave WebAnnotator. Do you want to continue?') may help.
Design 2
This design is called the Notebook. Just as the name suggests, the design is based on the model of a notebook. The user cannot directly annotate on top of a webpage. Instead, a frame imitating a note page is attached to each webpage and the user can only change the content of this frame.
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