JOURNAL

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July 24 - July 30

From Monday to Wednesday I was mostly busy running my study. Including Damien last week, I ended up with 8 people overall! Half of them were involved with the group that wrote the paper, and half of them weren't. Then I spent a while typing up all of my answers in a spreadsheet, comparing answers and figuring out just what it was people wanted. In addition to the answers people wrote down, I took a lot of notes on things they said or did, so I went through those too. I have to say, it was a little frustrating. I ask a question that says choose A or B, and people say C and D. Between studies I finished cleaning up my code, and did a little more debugging. Thursday morning I met with Prof Carroll and Prof Rosson, and we talked about my results. They seemed thrilled that we got more questions than answers. Apparently this is classified as a design study, and in a design study you are just exploring a design, and questions and issues and ideas and such are helpful because they give you feedback. And apparently this is what my next study is supposed to be too, and what my paper is supposed to be about. Hmm. I guess I'm more for things concrete than sort of... hand-wave-y. I guess that's why I love Computer Science and math and such so much and am not an artsy person at all. HCI is probably the most "hand-wave-y" part of CS though. But I love it because of the human aspect, and I'll have to live with the fact that anything involving humans is just going to be that way. Our minds and behaviors are not simple enough to just put in foolproof categories and pull statistics out of. Anyhow, so I made some changes in my code to best complement my findings, and went back and tweaked my paper a little in terms of its set up and approach. Also found a couple useful papers I might want to cite. (If you are ever writing a paper, use scholar.google.com. It's so amazingly useful!)

Friday, after getting a little feedback from some people who had participated in my study, I changed my code a little bit more, then checked it all in. That means no more looking at BRIDGE source code ever again! =D. Friday was Julie's last day at work before she moves to DC, so we all went out to lunch to say goodbye. After that and ILSD meeting, Damien and I spent the rest of the evening checking my code out onto his machine, creating a feed to watch certain objects, and subscribing to the feed through a bunch of different RSS readers. We knew what it looked like through a few windows readers, but I wanted to find something to tell Mac people to download. I've found out that a lot of the readers don't like when you try to use HTML tags in the fields of your feed. Now I just need to write up something like a brief description of the feed so we can send it to people Monday when they start using it for real =).