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Prestudy

Prestudy

The thing I did before the thing

lololololololol

Instead of the normal lecture in the course IT1301 30 January 2013, a prestudy ....

...to get a better understanding of how students feel about existing digital books and curriculum, their expectations on what a digital book should be and feel like, and how much text they read digitally versus the amout they read in paper format. This was done to be better ...... to design the following "proper" study.

Introducing the study, a short presentation of the project and the motivations behind it was hadm after which the interview took place. Some initial questions and areas of interest were decided upon in advance, but intentionally kept as open ended as possible to better be able to assess ....

The participants was allowed to try out Clementine, both on the laptops they brought themselves, as well as on tablet devices.

The initial subjects and areas of interest

  • Do you regularly read digital texts?
  • Do you own a tablet devices
  • Do you prefer to print articles, or do you read them on a screen?
  • What is important in digital texts?

The prototype was also to be tested by the participants, to get feedback on the metaphor and navigation methods implemented. A secondary , this helped priming the respondents, both reminding students , for those who have not tried such applications

The rest of the interview happened.... as the interview went along.

The session as a whole lasted approximately 90 minutes.

Methods

The main part of the prestudy was a

Even though highly adviced against, the main participant selection method was convenience – the attendees of a single lecture

A mere three people attended, and thus these people were to be the attendees.

  • Semi structured group interview
  • User testing
    • Due to the rather simple nature of the prototype, the respondents were not given tasks to accomplish, as one would normally do. The respondents were instructed to navigate through the prototype, and quickly discovered all the things possible. Based on the feature requests gathered one could potentially expand the prototype
For instance, if one were to implement the note feature, complete with a centralized repository to contain them, one could design tasks around the creation and retrieval of these. 

About the participants

The number of participants in the study was initially unexpectedly low, but

There were three participants in the study. ... somewhat low, but turned out to be a good prestudy, where the future of the research were to be decided upon.

Some book mentions how an interviewer conducting a group interview should emulate the interviewees. This comes rather natural by the interviewer being a male student from the same university in the same age group.

The low number of people in the study could have been a factor in making the conversation go so smoothly as it did, as it was easy to have a ... of who said what (to make it possible to)

The students did not only talk to the interviewer, but also among themselves,

Three males in the same age group, doing the same course on the same university. ... This is a tad bit heterogenous.

Two of the people were using Windows laptops, one used a Mac. Two of the people owned a tablet computer, one owned an iPad, the other a 10" Android based tablet.

When questioned about their reading habits, none had read complete books digitally, though had been reading academic texts digitally. The tablet owners had read these

Both of the tablet owners were aware of the availability of books tailored for their devices, and had intentions to start reading longer

When questioned why they felt they needed tablet computers The form facort made the experience more natural than on a computer screen.

The Amazon Kindle app is available for both the Apple iPad and Android based tablet devices, something the owners of the tablets were aware of.

Alle med tablets hadde intensjoner om å begynne å lese digitalt. Virker som om folk finner formfaktoren mer naturlig

None of the participants owned eink screen based tablets, but did know of the supposed benefits of such screens compared to "regular" backlit, flickering displays.

Contrary to what STUDY .... , the participants actually preferred to read academic texts digitally and had a rather high threshold for printing texts. There were several factors to why this was the case. Among the reasons cited where environmental concerns, that the texts are easier to transport and is made more available digitally. The possibility to search inside the texts as some texts have was a major advantage for having the text available digitally. Furthermore did one of the participants mention that, as he used to taking notes on his computer in Microsoft Word while studying (an activity shared by many students according to STUDY), it is was easier for him to study if he could have the text and notes on the same plane instead of having to move his eyes from a physical paper and to his screen.

Ingen hadde lest bøker digitalt før, men alle hadde lest lengre (akademiske) tekster. Relativt høy terskel for å skrive ut dokumenter og foretrakk å holde det digitalt.

Vil ha skolebøker digitalt

...this is interestingly in stark contrast to the study http://www.mmaglobal.org/JAME-Archive/JAME_Vol20_3/The%20Surprising%20Foil%20to%20Online%20Education%20Why%20Students%20won't%20give%20up%20Paper%20Textbooks.pdf

About digital text available today

Even though the study will first and foremost compare different ways of representing digital text, the participants in the study soon

This is natural, as the example text would alternatively be made available as a PDF document, not as a long scrolling text. The discussion on PDF documents did however show that there are reasons to compare Clementine to such alternatives.

PDF documents are percieved as being static

PDFer er faste

The way PDFs are created, many of them are lacking proper search and

Mangler ofte godt søk, copy-paste

Good PDFs works well

When qustioned about what makes a PDF document good, the ability to search and highlight text were the examples...

Disadvantages

The respondents

The biggest disadvantage of reading texts digitally were the screens are tiresome for the eyes

Man blir jo sliten i øynene av å lese på papir og.

The respondents did however talk about how today's high resolution, low latency, .... (oppdateringsfrekves) screens such as found on the later Apple iPad models, reducing this problem to a point to the strain on the eyes from reading from a screen not being that greater than the one produced from reading from paper.

The light prevents the text from being read in bed, as the backlighting being too bright There are some research confirming this, saying that the light produced by digital screens are similar to , tricking the brain to stay awake.

This was however "not a dealbreaker".

Om å skrive ut

Respondentene skriver svært sjeldent ut pga.

  • Miljø
  • Vekt
  • Penger
  • Skriver allerede notater i Word, bedre å bytte mellom to vinduer på en skjerm enn å veksle blikket mellom skjerm og bok - slitsomt

Skrive ut først når jeg er på jakt etter noe

Reactions to Clementine

The initial reaction was that Clementine was clean and visually pleasing, albeit too clean in some areas where it was perceived as being "empty". While not strictly relevant to the study, the lack of advertisements cluttering the page was mentioned to be a positive factor. When questioned wether he expected there to be advertiments on the book, he said that he did not exactly know. This is interesting to note, as this could suggest that the book, even though it is far from being a traditionally laid out web page, is still percieved as a web page (where one is conditioned to expect adverts), by being web based.

There were some differences in how Clementine was perceived in a desktop web browser compared to on a tablet device. On the desktop it was perceived to be a bit disorienting, as normal web pages scroll vertically (Clementine's pages are laid out horisontally). On a tablet device the motion and navigation methods was on the other hand perceived as being very natural, and was quoted as being "seemingly made for tablets".

None of the students had tried similar reading software (such as the Amazon Kindle desktop app, which Clementine shamelessly copy) on desktop computers. The pagination direction can be changed, even based on input methods. Thus one could make a horisontally paginated version for tablets and a vertically paginated version for desktop browsers. This is something that might be worth exploring in future user testing.

The overal reception of Clementine, as a prototype ebook, was a positive one, and something that the student said they "could get used to using".

Feedback

Parts of the interview were conducted with the participants using the Clementine prototype on both their own laptop computers and Android tablets. While not the intention of the interview, some feedback were gathered on the prototype itself. This feedback included feature requests, bugs and annoyances, and suggestions on further improvements.

Menu drawer

As the left side menu drawer lacks buttons and is scrolled in by using either gestures or mouse scroll wheels, the menu is rendered unusable on a computer that lacks such input methods. One of the participants in the study could thus not navigate in the menu.

The participants expected the menu to close when they touched or clicked outside the menu bar. This was a behaviour that was present in an earlier version of the prototype, but had disappeared due to adjustments done to the prototype done just ahead of the study. The feature will be added promptly.

The button meant to show the menu drawer was not as apparent as initially thought, at least not the

While the icon chosen for the menu button is used in many applications to indicate a menu, including the Facebook iOS app and the upcoming Firefox OS.

The reason Two hypotheses on why this is the case has been formulated, both dealing with the affordance of the button. Either the icon itself lacks the required affordance, or the button itself lacks the required affordance. As the icon design is used in so many other applications, it is thought to be the button itself, and should be rectified by making a button that is more inviting to touch.

Pagination

After loading a chapter or interacting with the menu, users can no longer use the browser's navigation buttons (in Opera: the arrow keys and space bar) to change pages without first clicking the text. This is due to the element on the page needing focus to change pages with the arrow keys or the space bar. In effect, this means that whenever a user clicks on any element that is not the actual book, the arrow keys will cease to function. This is not an issue on tablet computers, as one interacts with the application in a different manner (through swipes and clicking the edges of the page).

While easy to correct, this means replacing the browser's navigation features with custom navigation routines, which may not always be a good idea. A broader discussion on what to implement in the prototype, and what to leave to the browser can be found in chapter X. This is however a thing that can be such a detriment to the overall user experience on desktop computers that the feature is to be implemented ahead of the next user test.

Important elements of a functual digital book

After the user testing and following discussion on how Clementine was percieved, the topic of what a digital book needs to have, functionality-wise to be functional.

Questioned about features that needs to be present in a digital book, the respondents had a few ...

The answers given to this question was a bit coloured from having tried Clementine, but also functionality found in other similar software, mainly PDF readers. The

Chapter overview

There has to be an easy way to navigate between the different sections of the book.

Search

Trying to

Tatt fram som et viktig element og en av de største fordelene for digitale bøker.

When questioned how they search on the different devices, the Android tablet owner said that he seldom actually searched on his tablet, at least compared to how he reads on a desktop. It just did not feel as natural.

Søker ikke på tablet, ikke så mye av og til. Føles ikke like naturlig som på tablet.

Vant med en nettleser

There were also some discussion on how to best implement this in a digital book. As Clementine is implemented at this moment, where the different chapters are located in separate files, the search feature present in all modern browsers will only search in individual chapters. This in not sufficient, as one would like to search the book in its entirety to get the best results. A discussion on how to best solve this problem is located in chapter X.

Copy/paste

The book needs to be available in a format the user is able to directly copy text from.

Some of the document types the interviewees are familiar with does not do this, due to at least two factors:

  • The documents being photocopies without selectable text
    • Also makes it impossible to highlight
  • The documents having scrambled text
    • The text is highlightable, but the copied text is nonsense.

Page numbers

This was a point that was specifically asked, as this has been a point of concern when designing Clementine. See the discussion on page numbering in chapter X.

Diskuterte muligheten for å bruke prosenttall istedet for sidetall, men det kunne virke som om sidetall er enklere å forholde seg til.

Diskusjon om dette sidetallet skulle gjelde for hele teksten eller bare for enkeltkapitler * Et poeng som kom fram var at det "kunstig lave" antallet sidetallet var en form for positiv "løgn" (deception), gjør teksten enklere å posjonere. Sier ikke alt om hvor langt en har kommet i teksten. Ingen nødvendighet å ha et felles sidetall for hele boka, det gikk egentlig like bra å ha for enkeltkapitler.

Sidetall brukes for å kommunisere hvor i teksten man er (til senere), til å kunne fastslå hvor i teksten en viktig ting er.

En god grenmeny kan si nesten like mye som et sidetall. Kapittel - Sub-kapittel - Sub-sub-kapittel.

Et problem med sidetall er at de ikke er felles for alle lesere. Clementine er ment å kunne brukes overalt, og skal tilpasse seg de ulike skjermstørrelser og input-metoder som brukes.

Det plukkes fram at lærere kan ha noe problemer med nye systemer. Prosenter kan kanskje brukes.

Folk liker å ha noe gammelt

People like to have something old

The notion that page numbering could constitute useful metaphor was uttered with the quote "people like to have something old".

Folk er redde for tall (mtp. prosent kan være skumlere enn tall)

Prosenter fungerer på et mindre antall sider (>100), da prosent med mange desimaler ikke er så kult.

Progress bar

The progress bar at the bottom of the page serves the same purpose as the page numbers: letting the users have a sense of how far they have read into the document. The users did not notice this feature immediately, but after having changing the page

The progress bar has a slight animation, which the interviewees found to be a bit distracting, citing that their eyes were drawn to the moving object on the screen.

Navigation/pagination

Navigating in Clementine is done by touching or clicking the edges of the web page, by using the arrow keys on a keyboard or by swiping the virtual pages on the horisontal plane. The interviewees was not initially directly instructed on how to navigate, but figured it out themselves. ... gjorde de ikke? litt usikker... kan ha kommet til skade for å vise hvordan man gjør det i presentasjonen........ tror ikke jeg kan anta at det var intuitiv. stryker denne setninga.

Co

Compared to traditional vertically scrolling web pages, the n

Positive

The paginated interface sets som...

Compared to

Plutselig kommer en borti musa, så – FAEN!

If the user unintentially scrolls the page ever so slightly, there is a bit of confustion on where the reader was reading, resulting in the user having to spend time regaining control.

Another positive thing noted was the ability to remove oneself from the document, and it could be easier for the user to go back to the text.

... , such as reading two pages before the next break.

The pagination seemed to be a way for the interviewees to chunk the text into more palatable pieces.

Compared to what one would do

Negative

Not as suited to desktops as it is suited to tablets.

This is a bit interesting, as traditional web pages are scrolled on tablets as well. Could it have something to do with the swipe gesture?

Notatfunksjon

Ikke alle var klar over at det finnes i PDF-lesere

Litt diskusjon hvor notater bør lagres. I et repositorie felles of ralle bøker i systemet (forutsetter et system som tar vare på bøker), eller sammen med boka i én fil. Det virker som om å ha alt om en artikkel samlet på et sted er fordelaktig. Ta hint fra PDF-lesere.

When questioned more on the notes ....

There seems to be two elements that are important when designing a note taking function for the book:

  • Relating/anchoring the notes to the text
  • The ability to access the notes from a central repositoty (inside a book) *Eksempelvis isammen med innholdsfortegnelsen

The students illustrated a workflow of how they imagined such a system working.

Inside the text - marked in a was. Speech bubble, hightlighted text. Outide the text - the note, with a link to the text where the note is anchored.

Feature requests

Bruke progress-meter til å bla raskt mellom sider.

Customization

The two main requests were to be able to set the font and the font size.

The font size can be adjusted by using the scale feature in the browser (readily available in the desktop browser, not as available in the mobile version), but this will scale the menu items and images as well, something that might not be ...

Retention of information added to the book

Related to the necessity of text highlighting and comments, there needs to be a possibility to retain the information across reading sessions.

As Clementine is a web based book and not a native app, it was suggested to add user accounts, where a user can log on and be able to access the hightlighed text and comments later on.

There are two solution to this: either store the data on a remote server, where a user is able to log on to to retrive the data; or store the data in the client itself. As there are pros and cons to both solutions that needs to be considered, the discussion on how to best implement this can be found in chapter X.

Simple tutorial

To avoid uncertainities, a simple tutorial shown on the ...

This is something that is for now to be avoided as much as possible. Instead, how to use Clementine is to be made more intuitive by use of solid metaphors and affordances.

Visual overview of the pages

A visual overview of the pages in the document, similar to the ones found in traditional PDF reading applications were suggested as a future improvement. Reasons for this was to have a greater overview of the book

With this feature implemented, it was thought that the added visual indications could help the reader remember where important information is located.

Of all feature requests made, this is the one the least feasable at this point as this would require the web application, on load time, to navigate through itself and take virtual screenshots of itself.

This is not to say that it is impossible

Hvordan er en god digital bok?

Where physical books excel

The main advantage of having the text

... akin to "spatial awareness"

Quickly

Lett å bla raskt til informasjon, gitt at du har en formening om hvor i bøka (og hvor på siden) informasjonen ligger.

Top 3

Concluding the interview, after much discussion, a top three list of features that should be present in a digital ebook reader was produced. There seemed to be consensus around the following three items: bookmarking, text highlighting and commenting.

While the three items were proposed by only one of the participants and the other two agreed upon the points, these three items were the most prominent ones in the ... discussion.

Bookmarks

While all modern browsers provide the possibility to bookmark pages, longer texts need the ability to bookmark at specific points in the text.

Text highlighting

Commenting

Conclusions

...

The results of the prestudy are to be used to prepare and create the main study.

The prototype is not to be expanded upon at this moment in time, apart from correcting simple bugs and errors. This is due to...

The students showed an unusually high threshold for printing, something that could be attributed to the homogeneity of the interviews, being computer science students.

There were some slight issues keeping the discussion on track. While not comp

... I wanted to compare a paginated interface on digital texts to texts that are scrolled. as the interviewees kept

The main reason for this being an issue I suspect is de to the fact that the text studied, a course compendium, would in its alternate form not be available in a traditional scrolling wall of text, but most likely in a PDF format.

It is likely that how the students expect a compendium to be, based on their previous experiences with the medium, coloured their expectations and the discussion.

The more interesting question is -

"How well does the prototype emulate the compendium reading experience", rather than the more interesting question that the study is : "How to maximize digital readability and usability" (jobbe litt mer med denne)

... making a digital text as readable/usable as its analogue counterpart? Is the paper the gold standard? What on Earth is so bloddy good about paper?

Homogeneity

I read with my fingers.

As the group interviewed were too homogenous the results are not generalizable to a wider public. This has been made more apparent after discussing the project and the study with students from other diciplines. Where the group interviewed all had a preference for reading academic articles on their computer, I could find several preferring to print the articles and read them from physical format (something that is more consistent with the available literature on the subject). When probed about the reasons for reading from paper, there could be found several factors, one of the students talked to preferred the tactility of the text and studies by sliding her fingers across the text as she read it. This is something that is better achieved on paper than on screens.

Moving forward

A questionaire

The main interviews - talk to smaller groups at a time. More structured than the prestudy, but about roughly the same issues

Interviewing the people from the initial prestudy again, after a while

Maybe even a new version, implemeting a few of the items that is wanted -- decided upon based on a questionaire? -- SUS

An interesing question to be asking is "what kind of documents are best suited to paginated navigation".

Based on the experiences from the study and conversations with other students, there might be a need to expand the study to involve students gathered from other fields for at least parts of the later study.