Week 2: Gearing up for the Usability Test!

As we are finishing off the second week of the quarter, we are pretty much ready for the next week's Usability Test. The glitch that Lindsey mentioned in last weeks posting about the problem encountered when plugging the external keyboard, we were able to fix it, thanks to Alex's untiring effort! So now if the external keyboard is plugged in then the keyboards do not show up whenever the focus is in textboxes.

Also this week Alex and Lindsey have been very busy preparing the design of the posters for the conferences they are attending next month and are ready with the final design. Once this design gets approved by Prof. Ludi, they would start filling out the contents. Hopefully they would be able to get that done next week; so you can watch out for the preview in next week's post!

We were also quite busy this week preparing the schedules for the Usability Test. We are planning to carry it out over the next two weeks. We are really excited about the testing and hope to find interesting data. We'll let you know about these as well in next entry.

Another issue we fixed this week is again polishing the application; and this one is regarding the maintaining of log of the events generated through user's interaction with the system. For instance, we are logging what icons the user has pressed, its exact location (clicked coordinate), along with the timestamp. Another information that we are logging is whether the user has zoomed in or out. We were able to trap these info earlier but were struggling to have them write to a file. But finally this week we were able to get this one through as well!

So it all looks quite good and smooth as we are gearing up for the test next week!

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Abhishek

Week 1 again!

Hello everyone,

We started off this quarter by putting our test applications on the iPad to try them outside of the XCode simulator.  They both worked fine except for a small problem that occurred when you plugged in an external keyboard.  We want users to have the option to be able to use either the virtual keyboard or a physical keyboard, but we had overlooked the fact that our lecture view will display a little bit differentlu depending on whether or not the screen had to display the keyboard as well.

We realized early on that when the virtual keyboard popped open it'd cover up part of our lecture view, so to fix this we made it so that whenever the notes box was opened for typing, we'd push the lecture view up so that none of it would be hidden by the keyboard. Unfortunately we forgot that when the user plugs in the physical keyboard, we won't need to push the lecture view up.  We were able to fix the problem (thanks to some old posts we found on stackoverflow.com) so now the apps will display nicely regardless of what keyboard you choose to use.

Aside from that, Alex and I have been working on preparations for the two conferences we will be attending next month.  For one of the conferences we needed to revise our abstract, and for both of the conferences we need to create our posters.  Alex and I brainstormed yesterday to figure out what information we want to highlight on the posters, and then today we created a nice mock up of one of the posters using Photoshop.  Alex used some of his Photoshop ninja skills (which I'm hoping will rub off on me...) and now our design looks really nice.  Neither of us have made a poster before so we're waiting to get feedback from the professor we're working with.  Once we've come up with a solid design, maybe we can post the mock-up on here as a nice little preview.

We're also going to start scheduling people for the usability tests next week. We were able to recruit ~10 or so people who wear glasses that want to do the tests.  While it's disappointing that we were unable to find visually impaired volunteers, a lot of other research projects we've read about experience similar problems and had to similarly use people who wear glasses.  A lot of tests that were designed for completely blind subjects had to use volunteers wearing blindfolds because sometimes it's quite difficult to find people that are actually in your target group.

We'll let you know what happens this week with the development of our poster and with the upcoming usability tests!

Lindsey

Second quarter reflection

Hello everyone,

We managed to make a lot of progress this quarter, including:

• Reading papers to find out what other researchers have discovered already about areas related to what we're working on (i.e. usability for multi-touch, mobile device accessibility for visually impaired, etc)
• We also organized all of the relevant articles we found, and made a chart so that you could see which articles were related to different keywords. (i.e. which articles are about zooming)
• Reading papers on usability tests/testing to learn the process
• We developed several prototype applications that we could use during initial usability tests to figure out what kind of gestures the users preferred and found intuitive, as well as how the users felt about the UI.
• We ran into a lot of bumps along the way as we were developing these, but ultimately we reigned supreme over Objective-C and all of the weird little bugs we had made.
• As we progressed with our research into other usability tests that have been done, we found a paper discussing different types of images that can be used to test various aspects of note-taking sort of application.  We decided to adjust our test application so that you can cycle through several different types of images, each testing something different.
• We also implemented part of the note-taking aspect of the application, which will allow us to test the functionality of our application by having the test subjects try to zoom in and read different notes and see if they can take their own notes using our app.
• This will help us determine whether or not our app is actually able to help people with viewing notes.
• We wrote out our plans for the usability test as well as making forms that we could use to fill out the test subjects responses to questions, and the form will store the information in a spreadsheet which will make the data easy to evaluate.
• We wrote code that would allow us to print out things such as what button the users presses and where, as well as the time of the action.  We can use this kind of information to see if people have difficulty hitting buttons, or figuring out which buttons to press, for example.

And two of the most exciting developments for the quarter were our admission into two different conferences! We'll be presenting a poster at both:

• Posters on the Hill which is a conference where students can present their research to government officials, such as congressmen.  The purpose of the conference is to show government officials where research funding actually goes, and what kinds of research are produced as a result.  We're going to want to show them how important our work is so that they'll continue to support undergraduate research.

• The 2011 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing conference, which is going to be in San Francisco and includes a lot of panels by people in research and industry, which we're both excited about seeing. The program is up on the website, so if anyone wants to see what kinds of things we'll be doing for those 3 days you can view that here

All in all we've had a really busy (and really exciting) quarter.   I'm guessing that this quarter will be even busier, and even more interesting, so I'm definitely looking forward to it.

Lindsey

Winter Quater Reflection

The Access Lecture team was able to achieve quite a lot during this quarter. The main highlights include functional prototype ready for usability testing, research on related works, setting up the database required for the application and of course acceptance into two conferences!

While the fall quarter we mainly focused in the basics of iOS programming, in the last quarter (winter) we were able to actually build on top of it to make a prototype for our application. We also tried to gain some insight as to how the application would look like for people with tritanope, protanope, and deuteranope types of color blindness. So we have applications ready that include varieties of multi-touch gestures (zoom and tap) as well as colored and gray scaled version and also various images (math equations, geometry figures, chemistry equations, and biology figures) so that we could cover all the bases of the likely scenarios that the target audience would find in real life. We have also have the survey ready (both pre and post) for the usability test.

We were also able to get some work done setting up the database and some basic forms that allows to manage courses and lectures. But when it came to deployment we ran into few issues which remains yet to be resolved.

Another area that we worked on this quarter is going through a lot of related articles to gain knowledge as to what other advances have been made in the same field as ours. It provided us with some good ideas regarding some issues that we need to consider for conducting usability testing as well other innovative ideas. We were also able to get in touch with a similar research group. We hope to exchange some of our ideas further next quarter.

And last but not the least, some of the team member got accepted into two prestigious conferenes. These would indeed be a great opportunity to share what we have been doing over the last two quarter as well as the progress that we'd making next quarter. Kudos and congratulation to the team members!

Looking ahead...for the spring quarter we would be actually conducting the usability test which can yield further insights about the improvements required for the application.

--
Abhishek

A Quarterly Reflection - via Alex

Hello all,

Winter quarter has ended and Spring quarter has begun (although I can't say that the weather correlates!); We thought that it would be appropriate to post individual reflections/summaries of our second quarter of work on Access Lecture. If you have been following us at all, these reflections will be very similar to the first quarter reflections posted a while back. If you haven't been following us, then I think that you'll catch on rather quickly!

---

A big picture overview:

So, what exactly did we get done this quarter? The answer to this is "a lot", so I'll sum-it-up in a more abstract format, for both my sanity and yours. I will divide our focus points and accomplishments into two categories: technical and scholarly.

1. Technical Focus Points
We made a lot of technical progress in regards to developing our app for the iPad, as well as developing for the iPad in-general. I recently had a look over the first resources that we bookmarked and shared to try and teach ourselves these crazy things called "Objective-C" and the "iPhone SDK". Here's what some of them were called:

• "The Hello, World Application: An Overview"
  
• "How to Handle Basic iPhone Interaction"
• "Creating a Basic iPad Application"
• "A Basic Fundamental Guide for iOS Application Design

Well, you get the point. Looking back at these tutorials, it's almost laughable how little we knew at the time! I think that these past two quarters have proved that the "learn by doing" approach certainly works, as we are all very adept in various areas of iPhone SDK development. I've actually started answering iPhone development questions in Stack Overflow for fun (for the reputation!).

In short, we have more than solidified our knowledge of the fundamentals of iOS development, and then some; we don't need to yell for help whenever we want to add a new feature anymore! It's a great feeling to realize that you've gained so much knowledge without even realizing it.

So, specifically, what have we accomplished technically for Access Lecture?

1. The near-finalization of our prototype applications for our usability tests.
   
2. A polished UI, with emphasis on visual accessibility.
3. The full implementation of the Note-Taking Box feature.
4. A multi-touch logging system, that records the coordinates of each tap. This feature will be very valuable for usability testing, and will allow us to pinpoint potential usability flaws.
5. Fixed various bugs with our prototype apps, most of which have been haunting us all year!

I feel pretty good about that list!

2. Scholarly Focus Points
I use the term "scholarly" to encapsulate all of our work/achievements in regards to our research (and the accompanying research process) itself. The key items to mention are:

1. Our acceptance to present and attend two computing research conferences! The Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference in San Fransisco, and the Posters on the Hill conference in Washington D.C. We will be presenting a poster on Access Lecture at both of these conferences.
   
2. Our intense work and research into usability testing. The term "usability test" has been all over our blog this quarter, and for a very good reason! We achieved and completed work excellently in this regard.
   
3. The accumulation of a vast amount of scholarly research articles that relate to our own research at Access Lecture in various ways. We now have an excellent collection of notes and references on these articles, which will be used when we eventually write our own papers and reports.

In summary, we gained an incredible amount of experience and received a comparable amount of exposure to academic research and the nuts and bolts that go with it. Our acceptance to the conferences was exciting news to say the least, and to think that they're both coming up in a little over a month's time!

In Closing:

I have gained a great amount of exposure and experience to both the research and technical aspects of research. I am really amazed at how much I've learned about so many different things in just one quarter, I feel very accomplished and proud to be a part of this project. What's even better, is that we still have one quarter of part time work, and then an entire summer of a 9-5 for the Access Lecture project! With so much more to go and so much already happening, I can barely even speculate on what is to come for me in the future!

Here's to another great quarter, and most of all, some more great fun!

Thank you for reading.

- Alex