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Our suggestions for future researchers include both improvements to the current experiment and more fundamental modifications to the experimental design.
To improve the current experiment, the main issue would be to reduce the sources of variation discussed in section 4.2. First, one would need to reduce the ambiguity in the questions, either by eliminating presentation material that is ambiguous or replacing the questions which caused the problems. Second, one could reduce the amount of typing by asking yes/no or multiple choice questions, which could be answered with either a single keystroke, or with some modifications to Mpad, a mouse click. We also considered an experimental design where the instrumentation was built into Pad++ itself, rather than a separate tool. However, our estimate of implementation effort exceeded what was possible for a semester length student project. This may be an option for experimenters with more available resources than a student group.
The experimental design changes we would suggest considering involve modifying either the task, the dependent variables, or both. The goal of these changes would be to improve our measurement of errors and retention of information. One possibility would be to change the task to that of following a fixed path through the presentation space, and to measure errors as deviations from that path. Our observations indicate that the current design makes it very difficult to distinguish errors due to the content of the presentation and errors due to zoom period. If the task is not changed, we would recommend eliminating error rate as a dependent variable.
Our measurement of retention failed, since the subjects tended to retain what they were asked about, rather than location-based information. Our recommendations are to