Designing ConNote, A System for Contextual Notetaking

Despite the plethora of electronic notetaking devices such as PDAs and Tablet PCs in the market, paper remains the dominant medium for takingmicronotes. Micronotes are quick, informal notes which serve as reminders or organizers. Notwithstanding its ubiquity in the workplace in the form of Post-It notes and torn napkins, micronotes nevertheless have been shown to be di fficult to interpret after the fact. Illegible handwriting, the passage of time and forgot ten abbreviations all conspire to obfuscate the original no te’s meaning for the note’s author. In this paper, we describe our exploratory design of ConNote, a system forcontextual notetaking that allows context to be quickly tagged to digital notes taken on a Tablet PC, both by the user and system. Notes are then saved with this context metadata for later retrieval. ConNote supports a distinction between incidental andintentional context—context which occurred while a note was taken, and context manually attached by the user to a note to indicate relevance. Finally, ConNote addreses the ephemeral nature of context by discerning past, current and intermediate context.