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