Earlier this year, we announced that we now support integrating D2 with OpenAnnotate to provide document annotation capabilities.  For this post, we thought we’d dive deeper into the user interface aspect of the integration and compare the D2 approach with HPI.

To recap from the post earlier this year linked above, the D2 integration allows a right click action on documents to launch OpenAnnotate in a separate browser tab.  While this certainly works, HPI takes a different approach where OpenAnnotate is embedded in HPI.  We prefer HPI’s integration for two reasons:

• Ease of adding annotations – in HPI, a user can simply start annotating immediately as they are viewing the document.  With D2’s approach, the user must right click the document, click the ‘annotate’ action, wait for OpenAnnotate to load in a new tab, and then finally begin annotating.
• Annotation feedback – with HPI’s approach, it is immediately apparent when viewing a document whether or not annotations exist, since OpenAnnotate’s status bar will be available immediately.  With D2’s approach, it’s difficult to know whether or not a document has annotations when viewing the document.  Users can launch OpenAnnotate in a new tab with the annotate right click action, but that is cumbersome.  Users can also expose a ‘relations’ tab to display the dm_note annotation relationships.  However, this is user-unfriendly as the majority of users aren’t going to know that annotations are relationships under the covers.  Users would have to be trained to know to look for Annotations in the relations tab first.

Check out the video below that compares the OpenAnnotate integration approaches for both D2 and HPI:

Let us know your thoughts.