Information Presentation

An important Now & Then design stipulation requires that information retrieved from searches and queries be relevant and inclusive. Most of all, retrieved journal information needed to be presented and displayed in ways that engaged the user and provided immediate understanding―hopefully producing frequent "ah ha", moments of insight.

We understood the "catch 22" of journaling―if the user isn't motivated to enter their daily activities, observations, and thoughts, their browsing provides skimpy and boring results. Our goal was to make sure that journal searches returned information that was organized for insight, interestingly formatted, and encouraged users to frequently browse and search their journals. We understood that search results needed to be both illuminating and entertaining―providing the motivation for users to consistently and substantially update their journals.

With this in mind, Now & Then was designed to organize and display your retrieved information for easy comprehension and to support intuitive leaps of thinking―it organizes and packages your past in formats that are relevant to your present thoughts, inquiries, musings.

The program automatically selects the best combination of presentation methods from a large variety of representation schemes. Depending on the focus of the query and nature of the retrieved information, Now & Then displays your query results using a mixture of charts, tables, timelines, grids, sequential narrative, concept-focused narrative, and graphics.

In this way, Now & Then aggregates only relevant information―narrative, tables, audio, photos, annotations, and time series. It visually presents the information in ways that facilitate and encourage comparing and contrasting information and that illuminate hidden patterns and suggest answers.

Automatic & template presentations
Your journal information is stored in its "native" format―just as you entered it. It is also automatically "atomized", re-assembled, and formatted as a "virtual" presentation based on your queries and browsing. You can always modify the resulting presentation to focus on a particular interest and to reflect your personal preferences. To retain any (virtual) presentation for future use, simply give it a name and save it as a Presentation Template.  (continued)

home