As stated above, the goal of our second study was to find
out why so many of the social annotations in the first study
went unnoticed. We designed an experiment to investigate
what would happen to users’ page-reading patterns when so-
cial annotations were added in various different design vari-
ations. We hoped to find behaviors anchored in the familiar
presentation of search results that would explain why the so-
cial annotations in the first experiment were ignored. Our
particular research questions were:
1. Will increasing the sizes of the profile pictures make social
annotations more noticeable?
2. Are there learned reading behaviors that prevent partici-
pants from paying attention to social annotations?