Hard at work on the new note-taking system!

"Introducing the new Note-Taking Feature®. Innovation reinvented, all for the same incredible price."

You're welcome, Apple marketing team. I'll be expecting my job offer shortly.

We've been hard at work on incorporating the feedback from our latest set of usability tests into Access Lecture. We've already taken care of a surprising amount of our to-do list. However, there was one feature that all participants agreed needed a major overhaul: the note-taking feature.

What is the note-taking feature?
In addition to being able to follow along with lecture notes, our goal is to make Access Lecture capable of allowing students to take their own notes by writing directly onto the lecture.

The basic idea:
In using the new note-taking system, students will...

• Press a button to enter "note-taking mode".
• Use an iPad stylus to draw directly onto the real-time lecture stream.
• Save their notes directly onto the iPad as an image.

The issues:
During usability testing, the note-taking system took a snapshot of the currently-visible portion of the lecture. The application then transferred to a separate screen, where pen/eraser options were available. However, the snapshot did not allow the user to scroll or zoom. Additionally, the user's notes stayed on the image, regardless of where the user scrolled to in the lecture view, until the user saved and cleared.

The solution:
After a lot of brainstorming (see the image to your right), we came up with a solution that we hope will mitigate the issues experienced by testers.

Now, upon clicking the note-taking button, the following will happen:

• The user will not be taken out of the lecture view. This means that scrolling, zooming, and other features will still work as normal, and the lecture will continue being updated in real-time while the user is taking notes.
  
• The application's two toolbars will switch to two toolbars formerly present in the note-taking mode/view.
• To enable both writing and scrolling, the scroll gesture will require two fingers will note-taking is active.
  
• The user can write on the real-time lecture, now with no snapshot involved.
• Additional settings have been added, to adjust pen/eraser size.
  

We have this system nearly completed. The only issue we are facing is saving the user's notes, since it is no longer a snapshot of fixed size.

In conclusion:
We are extremely excited about the massive progress being made, largely with the help of our usability testers. Expect good news next week regarding the new note-taking system!

- Alex

Usability Testing Comes to a Close

Hello all,

We've just finished our second round of usability testing! It went better than we had hoped, and we have very high hopes™ here at Access Lecture (Trademark pending. Don't steal it. It's mine).

The Testing:
This second round of testing focused primarily on receiving feedback with regards to the app's new features. New features included:

• Zooming buttons (in addition to the pinch-gesture)
  
• A revamped note-taking system
• The ability to save notes to the iPad
  
• A settings page (including toolbar preferences and scroll/zoom options)
  
• New icons

Additionally, we were finally able to demonstrate a working proof-of-concept. Instead of showing pre-made/sample lecture images on the iPad, we were able to actually transmit our own whiteboard notes in real-time!

Test subjects were given a set of tasks to perform and give feedback on:

• Following along with and taking notes on three sample, real-time lectures.
• Adjusting the app's settings.
• Exploring the new note-taking system.
• Identifying the new icons.

After completing these tasks, additional, quantitative feedback was collected via a post-test interview.

Results:
While feedback in certain areas in the initial round of testing were a bit scattered, the feedback for round 2 tended to be nearly universal.

Here are some of the key conclusions which we have made about the app, based on user feedback from the latest round of testing:

1. The new icons were solid. 100% of participants found the icons intuitive and easy to see.
   
2. The new zooming buttons were generally considered to be intuitive, although many preferred using the pinch-to-zoom method exclusively.
   
3. Although the idea behind the new note-taking system was praised, the implementation needs a lot of reworking. This was expected, as this feature is still very much a work in progress.
   
4. 90% of participants would find Access Lecture helpful in a real course.
5. The settings need fine-tuning, but are on the right track.

Next Steps:
Work on integrating the feedback from the usability tests is already well underway. We have analyzed and prioritized the feedback, and have many of the high-priority fixes either implemented or near completion.

What remains to be done is to continue our brainstorming of an appropriate note-taking system. Participants did not want a still-image to write on, and would have preferred being able to both write and scroll on the actual lecture screen. This poses a significant usability challenge: how does one support useful and intuitive note-taking on-top of a real-time image stream? We are all excited to start brainstorming solutions!

Oh yeah, we hear back from ASSETS '11 in 8 days.

- Alex

Halfway through summer!

Hello everyone!

Last week Alex mentioned that our professor wanted us to begin working towards our second round of usability testing.  If you recall, our first round of usability testing was focused on the user interface, note-taking, icons, and the multi-touch gestures we can use for navigation. The tests went very well, and gave us a direction to move in with our application as development began.  Since then, we have worked a great deal on the application and it has become very...well...legit looking! A lot of the initial functionality we wanted to see in the application has been implemented, the note-taking system was revamped, and we were finally able to stream real lectures to the iPad.


And so, another round of usability tests were suggested. I'm a fan of the cyclical nature our development has taken, gathering requirements, developing, testing, using the feedback to further polish the system, and so on.  We want to make sure that the direction we've taken since our last tests was the right direction to take! That's why last week we developed new activities for the usability test, wrote up new pre-activity and post-activity questions, and completely rewrote our test script.  We also had to modify some of our code so that the application saved the users notes to the iPad's photo gallery (previously we were saving images on the desktop so that we could look at them easily). A couple of other minor changes were made (adding a clear all button to the the note screen, adding more feedback for the user so they can tell when they've saved something, adding an about page that has information about the developers/special thanks to CRA, etc) and we also created a new logo (seen above). It's supposed to be a whiteboard with a couple of markers and then the project name.  We wanted to have something nice to display on the home screen of the app.


Alex and I also came in on Saturday to make up some time we missed, and we worked on writing a "Related Work" section for a paper about this project.  We were unable to write a paper for the ASSETS conference this year but there are other conferences during the next academic year, and next years Access Lecture team might want to submit a paper for ASSETS.


This week we began the usability tests.  We were able to schedule two people for today, and there are four people scheduled to come in tomorrow. For our last round of tests we had 8 test subjects, and this time we'd like to get an even larger data pool. We appealed to one of the Computer Science professors that is here over the summer doing research with students and a couple of his students seemed interested in being test subjects.


The two tests we ran today went well, but wasn't a surprise because we've now had a bit of experience doing usability testing. Alex and I conducted the first usability test, and then Abhishek and I conducted the second test. We're already starting to see some issues pop up that didn't occur to us when we used the application, but we've also gotten some positive responses about things we've changed since the last round of tests, so it's very satisfying.


We'll update you guys more after we've finished up with our tests and looked at the data. So far it seems like we're going to have a lot of interesting things to consider about the application and where we're going with it.


Lindsey

Preparation for round 2 of usability testing begins!

Hello all,

We're extremely excited right now regarding our recent leaps in progress on Access Lecture. I believe that our progress can be best summarized as such:

Supervisor: "Alright team! It's time to get ourselves together and tackle this real-time screen capture issue! once and for all!"
AL Team: "Uhm, it's already done."
Supervisor: "...Really?"
AL Team: "Yep."
Supervisor: "Oh...well this is awkward."
AL Team: "Yeah..."
Supervisor: "Oh yeah? We still need to integrate it into the main project! Now get on that slackers!"
AL Team: "Did that too."
Supervisor: "Of course, I knew that!"
AL Team: "...So...what do we do now?"
Supervisor: "Do some usability tests! There's no way that you've had time to do that too!?"
AL Team: "Uh, no...no we haven't done those yet."
Supervisor: "What a bunch of slackers."

The AL project now boasts the implementation of these features:

• Integration of the real-time screen capture features which were discussed in the last blog post!
• Full zooming/navigation functionality has been added and modified to work with the real-time capture screen.
• A nice cleanup and sharpening of the app. Features are now more responsive to the user, and various bugs/glitches have been tidied up.

The key victory is that first bullet. As we discussed in our last blog entry, we were having more than a little trouble integrating the real-time capture functionality with the rest of the app; this was mostly due to the UIWebView not appreciating having its ScrollView modified. We decided to step-back and take a different approach, and it certainly paid off! Instead of displaying a webpage which refreshes continuously with images of the Mac's screen, a UIImageView is now fed a stream of those same images. The result is a view that looks exactly like the WebView, but actually functions!

Now that we have gotten the app to a stable and working proof-of-concept state, we are ready to conduct our second round of usability testing. The insight and feedback obtained from the first round was extremely valuable, and with so many new features added since then, the expectations for round 2 are equally as high. The goal is to begin the testing no more than 2 weeks from now.

Additionally, our applicant-paper for the ACM ASSETS 2011 conference has been finalized and submitted! Here's to hoping that we'll be in Scotland come fall.

- Alex