List.it Note Taking Study

Haystack Group, MIT CSAIL

What we are studying

We are conducting an academic research project surrounding how people use personal information managment tools, including note-taking tools like List-it in order to figure out how to make these tools work better for people.

In this particular study, we are examining three things:

How you can help

You can help us with our research by giving us permission to analyze your notes and note-taking taking practices. Merely giving us permission to do so is very helpful and helps us derive important conclusions for our research.

We may also occasionally send out a survey. Filling out such surveys will be of additional great help to us; but you are by no means committed to do so.

Two times each year we raffle off Amazon gift certificates to active list-it users who volunteer to let us look at their notes. Participation in the study automatically qualifies you to win. You will be notified via e-mail if you win.

What data we are collecting

If you volunteer, you give us permission to look at three things:

We NEVER RECORD the identities of the physical locations or the web pages you visit. Instead, your browser picks a random secret "nickname" for each place, and sends us that nickname. It is impossible for us to know what those nicknames stand for, but they let us know when you are in a place you have visited before. This is important because it helps us test our idea that certain notes are always accessed at the same place (or time).

How your data is protected

Your privacy and protection of note contents is our top priority. Participation in the study means that you give the researchers listed below access to your note contents for statistical analysis. But, your notes or their contents will not be divulged to anyone outside the researchers and will be analyzed for research purposes only.

If the reserachers wish to disclose notes or your data to anyone outside the study, they will contact you for explicit permission before hand.

How can I withdraw from the study?

Should you choose to withdraw from the study, you can withdraw from study participation by going to the Preferences menu and clicking "Withdraw from study". This turns off all Logging for Science features in Lisit, and you can continue to use Listit freely to keep your notes. Later, if you decide to re-join, you can click on "Join study" again.

This does not delete your data from the server, but forbids us from looking at it. If you want us to delete your data from the server (which will destroy backups of your notes), contact us at the below e-mail addresses directly.

Questions? Comments?

Please e-mail us any time with any questions, concerns or comments that you may have.