More User Studies and a bit of Personalization

Working on the user study stuff took up pretty much all of this week.  I started off fixing an issue we were having in the user studies with procedures.  The participants were being confused by the adding procedure step, so we resolved to just have Looking Glass do that part for you.  This is what I spent Monday doing.  I set up the framework for the action, and had it print out when a step in the transaction history would be skipped. With Dennis’ help, we got it to actually skip more or less correctly.  It wasn’t a hundred percent, but it was skipping some things.  However, we ended up not using this for the user studies and opted to instead just have users deposit the code directly into the main method, and not deal with procedures at all.  Good news is I will have to do a similar task for my own project on personalization.  Finding the correct transactions and checking if they have been activated or not is how I am going to monitor the basic actions in the user model.  For instance, checking if someone has ever done something before, like used a do together, or even played their world.  I can scan the transaction histories on the remix tutorials, and if I see a do together instance, I can mark off that they have now seen a do together.  This is the first level of personalization, introducing concepts.  And say that they haven’t seen one before, but they are going to in this tutorial, I can change the notes generated so they introduce a do together.

Tuesday was another user study.  I spent the morning before we left fixing up some things we needed to test for that day, and I spent the afternoon beginning to create the nine worlds we would need for the actual tests, and having a meeting with Dennis and Kyle about the various issues we needed to fix before the next user study on Friday.  On Thursday I finished these worlds and began trying to test them, by making common mistakes users do, and making sure the tutorials didn’t blow up…..unfortunately they did…a lot.  So, I ended up working with Dennis, Paul, and near the end of the night Caitlin, to try to get the new worlds ready for a user test we had the next morning.   In the end, the do together worlds, and the count worlds were proclaimed ready! Hurray!  We didn’t manage to get the for each up and running, but hopefully we will soon!

P.S. Sorry for this being so late!  I was preoccupied on Thursday, so it slipped my mind.  I just remembered I hadn’t done it.