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Users can make general comments about the piece that will appear in the container on the right-side. The artist-defined tags help to guide the reviewer’s feedback without restricting it. We had originally required users to categorize their comments based on a predefined set, but in prototyping we discovered that reviewers found this limiting and stressful. Tags offer a more flexible, but still guided user experience.
When the comment appears in the comment panel, the user is also presented with some embedded editing tools. Icons are used to give a quick information scent: The pencil allows users to edit the comment text, and the X-icon allows users to delete comments. When the user deletes a comment (X is highlighted on hover below), a message appears at the top of the interface giving the user the option to undo the action, as per users’ requests in testing. This message does not interrupt user interaction, like a dialog would, but fades after some time, again for flexibility. The user can dismiss the notification manually. This behavior is very similar to the email deletion behavior in Gmail.
Preceding the comment is a pin - on hover, a pointer cursor reveals it to be draggable - users can drop this pin anywhere on the image to associate this comment with a particular part of the art.
In this sense, a pin is an optional feature of a comment. We had originally treated “general comments” and “annotations” as separate entities, but early prototyping revealed that users felt this model to be confusing and inflexible, and difficult to discover in the case of annotations. This integrated, flexible, approached proved much more intuitive in user studies.
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