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Main study

Main study

The (first? only?) actual study

In two parts.

Based on how the students participating in the prestudy, the main study has been decided to be split into two main parts. The first part shall focus mainly on how the participating students' reading habits to get a broad understanding of how the students

The number of participating students ....

Where the prestudy was unstructured, the main study is to semi-structured, the structure based on the ....

There has to be a lot of wiggle room where the students are able to answer the questions

As mentioned, the amount of discussion both beteen the interviewer and the interviewees, as well as the amount of discussion among the interviewees themselves was a little bit impressive. It is thought that giving the interviewees a lot of room for discussion,

..., still, the overall discussion, and the conclusions drawn from the discussion has greatly helped the further development of the study itself.

After seeing how the respondents reacted after using the prototype before the interview (rookie mistake).

...the answers were coloured by how the book tested was...

This could have various impacts on the study including

  • not wanting to hurt the developer
    • exaggerating the importance of the techniques used
    • exaggerating all that is great about the prototype
    • understating the importance of the techinques the respondents felt they were missing
    • understating all that sucks about the prototype
  • priming..

Priming can be good, also bad.

Priming

Main areas of interest

The interview

Part 1

Your experiences More or less the same as the questionaire, but more thorough

With a ... on understanding how the respondents read digitally. Do they print the articles thay have to read? Do they read books digitally? Skjønnlitteratur kontra sakprosa, noen forskjeller? Har de noen gang lest en fagbok digitalt? Benyttet seg av internett i tillegg til fagboka? Erstattet fagbok med internett? Hvilke kilder benyttes i såfall?

As the interview is a semi-structured interview, only a set of core questions and themes are to be decided upon in advance. The rest of the interview is to consist of follow up questions and ........ If all goes as planned, the interviewer will be more of a moderator than an interviewer, where the group talks about their ideas and views among themselves. The interviewer should focus on taking notes and intervenes only when deemed necessary.

Unless the respondents refuses, the interview is to be recorded. This is to better be able to track who said what during the interview. During the prestudy, one of the interviewees was more vocal than the other, and the benefits of being better able to track who said what proved themselves.

Themes/questions

Reading experience

The interview will start by assessing the interviewees' experiences with reading digital texts, including how and when they prefer to read such texts. Of importance is the questions on wether they usually print longer articles than read them digitally (as literature suggest that most should), and why they choose or choose not to print the articles. As the lenght of the text seems to be one of the more deciding factors in wether or not people in general prints articles, we should try to find wether or not this is a factor for the interviewees.

Note taking

The second theme that is to be discussed is how the respondents take notes during reading. As reading academic text is often described as being responsive reading, where the reader reads .... Responsive reading is more often than not done with readers taking notes as they read. The interviewees are to discuss when, how and why they take notes, wether or not they do it digitally or analogously, including the differences in how they would do it digitally compared to digitally. Both the literature reviewed and the prestudy confirms that the ability to facilitate highlighting and note taking is a very important factor, often to the point to say that a digital book is unusable in responsive reading due to either not being possible, hard to find and/or being cumbersome to use.

The prestudy did however uncover some advantages in having the text available digitally when taking notes digitally. The interviewees are to discuss how this factors in on their perceptions of reading digital texts.

Both taking textual notes and the ability to

At some point, as the people in the prestudy noted by preferring not to print even though they preferred to read (longer) texts in a physical format, the pros of reading the digital version outweigh the cons.

Where does the analogue book excel?
Where does the digital book excel?
Designing the perfect digital book
Various
  • "What kind of documents are best suited to paginated navigation" (compared to scrolling)

Intermission - User testing

After the conclustion of the first part of the group interview, the testing of Clementine is to commence. Here, the interviewees are to use and read the ebook on their own with as little external influence and help from the interviewer as possible.

As the functionality of Clementine has grown a bit because of the response given by the interviewees in the prestudy, there is an incentive to create a few simple tasks for the interviewees to accomplish as part of the user testing.

The two larges pieces of functionality that has been created since the prestudy is the highlighting function and improved navigation inside the left side bar. The tasks that the interviewees are to solve iare based on these functions.

Tasks

The tasks the interviewees are to perform...

  • Pretend to read two chapters, from the beginning to the end

The purpose of the user testing

While interesting, the intention of the user testing is however not to assess the general usability of Clementine. Much rather, the testing will act as a priming for the later dicussions on how to best create the "perfect" digital book. The interviewees are expected to try this book on their own as part of the course, as the content of the book is part of their mandatory curriculum. As the user testing in some way can be regarded as an introduction to the book platform, where the users (in a worst case scenario) can be taught how to use it,. .... and be a platform where the users that are interested in using it can ask questions and .... resolve uncertainties in how to use the application. When the respondents are to be interviewed later on, their How it feels like to read longer passages of text, If some (or even all) of the respondents prefer not to read the book in the form presented, this will in itself prove to be a datapoint and a theme for discussion.

The testing will be done in pairs, where two people will perform the test on a single device. This is both to save time and to encourage discussion on how the application accomplish the tasks.

The interviewees are encouraged to point out any functionalities that they miss and other omissions that they would feel is necessary for Clementine to perform on par or better than an analogue text.

The prestudy .....

The user testing will thus be done on both a Windows based laptop computer and an Android based tablet, both provided by the interviewer. This is because of the rather large differences in how Clementine is used on different devices. It is suspected that some discussions can be had concering the best way of reading and navigating on the different devices, that some methods functions better than its counterpart.....

The prestudy unveiled that the pagination method of navigation through a text is more suited to be used on tablets than on laptop computers. Whether this a general conception or not could be discovered here.

Part 2

After the user testing, a short interview is to take place both to summarize and expand on the previous

This will be an opportunity to see if the preconceived notions on digital texts are confirmed. Might provide further insight in how

There might

Having being primed with a prototype web based ebook, the interviewees might

This interview is less structured than the initial semi structured interview, as the interview is to be based on the response from the first interview and the user testing.

Questionaire

This is not intended to be a scientific questionaire, but rather a way to help seed the interview with themes and questions and to get a broader understanding of the initial preconceptions of the students. The non-scientific nature of the questionaire makes the results non generalizable

The questions has not been pretested on realistic respondents, as is generally encouraged, but are ... The questions are however been discussed among other master students, to ensure that the questions are as non-leading as possible. There should be no "correct" answers. The questions from the questionaire is presented below.

Conclusion

  • Content validity
  • Construct validity
  • Reliability

Nah, none of these. Thi

Conclusion

Now the students are to read from the ebook more prolonged (one or more chapters). A later questionaire (interview?) given closer to the exam date, when it is believed that the book is more likely to be read, is to assess how the book is perceived.

The road ahead (or: what on earth should I use this data for)

A last talk, after a longer exposure to the book. More data!