Information Awareness on the Desktop: A Case Study

In the future, the amount of online information will increase as more people use the Internet for a growing number of activities. Staying updated on the status of important information requires a tool that will monitor information resources and alert the user when changes occur. To remain both useful and unintrusive, such a tool must provide quick access to information in a small space. To address this need, we created Irwin, a highly con gurable information monitoring tool. This paper describes Irwin and examines how four users used it over a ve-month period.