2.6 Procedures and Problems

A typical session of experiment has 5 steps:

  1. The subject reads the general instructions.
  2. The subject signs a consent form and fills out the background survey.
  3. The subject takes the training task and asks all the clarification questions he/she might have.
  4. The subject performs the experiment task.
  5. The subject fills out the post-experiment survey.

In the following subsection, we present steps 3 and 4 with more details.

The training

The training task aimed to get subjects trained in the Pad++ environment, and, moreover, to the environment that he/she would be facing during the real experiment.

A self-contained presentation about Sport Teams, as a well a set of questions embedded in Mpad, allows the subject to exercise the navigation commands, as well to gain understanding about the environment. This phase presented all three major tasks needed for the experiment and allowed the user to practice using Pad++ and Mpad. Figure 2 shows a typical screen in the training presentation.

Figure 2. Typical screen from training presentation

The training phase typically takes about 5 minutes for the subjects spent to answer the questions about sports teams, and to ask any clarifying questions as they are learning.

The task

The Norway presentation automatically opened in its cover page, and the subjects had to answer a question presented by Mpad. The first two questions are dummy questions, and they did not count towards the final performance of subjects. Their objective was to synchronize the clock since the time measurement is done between answers.

The subjects were faced with the following sub-tasks:

  1. A question is presented, and he/she should browse the presentation to find the answer.
  2. The answer should be typed, and the RETURN key should be hit.
  3. Go to step 1, for a new question. (see raw data)

Problems

Generally, the data collection elapsed without any problem, however we had the following occurrences:

  1. One subject was able to answer correctly one of the questions without going to exact site in the presentation.
  2. One subject said that the font size used in Mpad was too small for vision impaired people.
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