Netbase Enterprise: Annotations

Users need to be able to give their data context for both presentation and archival purposes

When we started discussing annotations, we first explored the idea of having the annotations built outside the data itself, giving time, date and commentary in a panel that sat alongside the data. But once we started digging into the concept of annotations, we thought that having the annotations be right on top of the data made more sense (if it could be done - a technical constraint we were not 100% sure could be implemented)

We believe annotating social data in our enterprise platform gives users the ability to look at the data in context of things not documented in the platform

In what manner were we going to both create annotations and show them in a way that didn't distract from the data itself

Our first concept was to have a side panel with the annotations, however we found that didn't give enough context and was cumbersome to the overall look of the UI

Alongside the development team we came up with the idea of annotating in the data view, and we worked through a few concepts before we came to the one you see here