Week 5- We Prepare Even More!

Hey all,

Last week Alex updated about our tests apps and our other preparations for the upcoming usability tests. This week went along pretty similar lines, we

• Continued fleshing out the script for our tests
• Continued working on our pre- and post- test surveys
• Fixed a couple of bugs with the test applications
• Made modifications to our test applications so that the lecture screen would be pushed up when you opened up the note view, so that the note view would not be obtrusive and cover the lecture up.

There is still more work and debugging we need to do with the test applications to get them ready. Right now, when the note box comes up it seems to block gesture recognition on the lecture view, which means that the user would not be able to zoom in on the lecture while they were typing. During our usability tests we would like to see if the participants can easily takes note on the lecture they're viewing and so this is something that we will need to fix prior to the tests.

This week we also came up with a title and an abstract for a conference that our CREU faculty member has recommended that we apply to. It's the 2011 Richard Tapia Celebration of Diversity in Computing Conference, and we've been working with our faculty member to make the abstract. Alex, Abhishek, and I came up with a draft for it and have changed it based on the feedback we've gotten. We also applied for the Posters on the Hill conference, but we won't hear back about that one until late February.

Next week we can get our abstract submitted, and then finish up some of the preparations for the usability tests. Once we're all set with our script for the testing process, we can start practicing that so that we'll be ready for when we're doing it for real. If we aren't ready for the real thing, mess ups could result in us having to throw out the data, so it's important that we're all prepared and know what to do. One of the upperclassmen that's working with our faculty member on another accessibility project even volunteered to come in during our practice tests and give us feedback and help out. Our faculty member, who has conducted these kinds of tests for her other projects, is also going to make sure that we're doing everything correctly before we try the tests with any of our real subjects.

-Lindsey