Scenarios & Applications

Preparing a Research Report

We often work on research projects that span across days, week, and sometimes months. Take, for instance, writing a research report for a class. It will involve going to lots of places online (and may be your library), finding and saving stuff, and finally compiling for your report or presentation. Coagmento can help you in every step of this process.

Turn on Coagmento as you start working on your research online. Coagmento will record the websites you visit. When you find something useful, you can use Coagmento to bookmark that page. You can also easily collect snippets of text or even pictures from any webpage. Coagmento automatically saves the source information, which means when you sit down to write a report or prepare your presentation several days later, you won't have to worry about remembering where that piece of information came from! Coagmento saves your searches and even the search results, so you can easily re-run your searches or bring back what you found back when you originally searched for it. And when you are ready, Coagmento provides you a workspace to put things together and create that final report!

Travel Planning

Taking a trip or planning a vacation is often not a simple endeavor. It may involve booking flights, hotels, car, looking for things to do, researching the attractions around the destination, etc. We often do these activities over multiple days, and if the trip involves other people (your spouse, friends, etc.), your planning may involve them too.

Let's say you are going to Hawaii with your best friend. Coagmento helps you keep track of your browsing as you work through looking for best deals for your travel. Once activated, Coagmento will record all the websites you visit and the searches you do. If you have added your friend as a collaborator for this Hawaii project, he/she can also see what searches you have done and what you have found. You both could be working on your own computers at time and place of your choosing. You can communicate with each other using Coagmento's integrated chatting without leaving your browser. You can comment on each others findings (webpages, snippets, pictures, etc.) and put together a plan using Coagmento's workspace. Finally, when you are ready, you can print out a compilation report to take with your trip to Hawaii. Say Aloha!

Healthcare

Meet Joe and Sally - brother and sister, whose mother has been diagnosed with type II diabetes. Both Joe and Sally want to gather useful information from the Web that could help their mother manage her symptoms and continue living a healthy, happy life. They both can use Coagmento - individually or together - for searching diabetes-friendly recipes, exercises, and online support groups. Coagmento allows them to chat with each other as they browse the Web, divide up the work, and share their findings and insights. Coagmento also provides tools for summarizing their findings and printing reports. Joe and Sally could either share those things directly with their mother, or use Coagmento's in-built collaborative editor to compile their findings in a more useful format.

Wedding Planning

Lori and Chirag Shah used Coagmento while planning their wedding in North Carolina in 2010. They both logged in to Coagmento before doing any wedding-related searches or browsing, allowing each other to see what the other person was looking and finding. One time when they were in the North Carolina mountains, they realized that they had shortlisted a place in those mountains for their wedding, but couldn't remember the name. Thanks to Coagmento, they were able to access their search history on their smartphone and re-find the place. Coagmento continued being an important tool as they carried on with their wedding planning.

Education

In 2011, Coagmento was deployed in a New York state high school, where some 70 students used it for a month-long group project involving information gathering and synthesis. According to our evaluation of the project, the students found this specialized CIS system engaging and helpful in their projects, while the teachers were excited about the system's ability to capture their students' processes as they were working through the projects – something that has not been possible for them so far, and that opened up a whole new direction for assisting and assessing students' collaborative work.

Research

Coagmento provides a flexible framework that can be adopted to many kinds of research projects that call for a user study. For instance, Coagmento can be used to capture online search behavior through its logging capabilities. Coagmento can serve as an important tool for a personal information management (PIM) study with its functions that provide access to one's search and browse histories. And if you are looking for studying computer-mediated communication (CMC), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW), or collaborative search, Coagmento has tools like information exchange, chat, and collaborative editor.

Over the years, Coagmento has been used for many research project - not only by Chirag Shah and his team, but also several research groups around the world. For instance, Max Wilson and his students used Coagmento to replicate a user study as a part of RepliCHI. Currently, Coagmento is being used in the field by scientists at The Open University UK for studying collaborative behaviors in online searching.