Answering Questions: Part II

A large part of the discussion last Friday was about the fact that the community portion of Looking Glass has not really been studied as much as the rest of the Looking Glass project. With that in mind, I am looking to design some sort of open-ended study to learn more about how users explore and learn from the various features of the Looking Glass Community.

I began with attempting to figure out a number of questions that I wanted to answer:

• Why would a user search?
• When searching/exploring worlds, what is the user's objective? (just find some worlds with cool tricks?)
• When searching/exploring remixes. what is the user's objective? (goal-oriented action. There is an animation in mind that the user wants to incorporate?)
• Do users want to sort their bookmarks?
• Why do users bookmark?
• How does the term "bookmarks" connect worlds/remixes to the IDE?
• Would renaming bookmarks make the connection more clear?
• Is pre-fabricated remixing good introduction?
• Does pre-fabricated remixing still help users learn programming concepts?
• Will users explore the different paths that remixing an animation can take? (modifications to the functionality that was remixed).

Caitlin suggested that we bring back users from Kyle's studies over the summer since many of these users will have already overcome the hurdle of getting used to the schematics of Looking Glass. This means we can focus a little more on a theoretical "long-term" user, who will use Looking Glass with some regularity.

Talking with Jordana, she suggested I take a look at some of Paul's old papers, since work has already been done about remixing. I intend to do this as soon as possible to discern if there is any pertinent information in these papers.

I am thinking about more of an observational study of user's exploring the various parts of the website. Perhaps there will be prompts to encourage users to find particular items like My Bookmarks or Tags, etc. The key will be to not restrict the users from doing anything, but prompt them towards exploring the current situation with remixing and bookmarks.

Are there other questions that I should be thinking about? Any questions that you would like me to think about or look into during the study?