Interaction model

[bzz]

Modelling the state of individual paper on backend (and not only in Gmail) will open a lot of opportunities e.g. tagging papers by topics, using that as a source for training data for training classifiers that target sub-fields, etc that go beyond our current use-cases that, of course, we also want to keep supporting (for background on the current use-cases see #19).

In order to decide how to proceed, we will need to answer the question: how does one mark papers as 'read' and then gets back to those later? Our current approach with a single, ever-growing "read" section on the same page although works, does not seem to be very productive.

I see two main alternative interaction models for managing the state of the paper:

1. The "inbox" model Very similar to what Gmail does: individual paper checkboxes (with bulk select) + tags. Then a "Read" section could be modeled by a dedicated tag.
2. The "report generation" model A "generate a report" action that aggregates everything unread to a timestamped report, marking all the papers as "read" in a bulk + a new page with the history of all reports for every individual user.

[bzz]

May be we could even create an interactive prototypes for both solutions in Figma + Principle 🤔