5.1 Impact for practitioners
Our study, by its high-specificity nature, holds
little real-world value. However, useful tangents and conjectures
may be gathered from aspects of the experiment. Of interest is
subjective satisfaction and user remarks. Some subjects mentioned
that they looked only at the query devices while ignoring the starfield
display. What good is a graphical query interface such as Spotfire if
users don't look at the visual element? Certainly, users with real
motivation would
use the software as intended. So a question for both researchers and
practitioners arises; how do you make certain that users will correctly
use your DQI correctly?
In our observation of subjects while they worked through the test trials
we saw that users, given a fairly comprehensive tutorial on most of
Spotfire's features, only used a few of these features to perform their
tasks. As noted before, some subjects didn't bother to look at what the
starfield display showed them, thus they proceeded to further filter out
data when it was not necessary. This suggests that while dynamic query
interfaces are a powerful tool, it is at first only a potentially
powerful tool. DQI users must be trained on how to realize the benefits
of direct manipulation and DQI.
5.2 Suggestions for future researchers
Perform multiple trial runs of subjects with different orderings of test cases
Use different query requirements for each task, instead of re-using the same task(which unfortunately allowed our subjects to memorize or familiarize themselves with the tasks, creating a possible bias).
Attempt to apply useful real-world findings based on experiment results.
Repeat experiment with expert users of Spotfire or other DQI, effectively removing "learning" bias.
Discover how to get users to utilize all functions of the DQI, including query devices and graphical displays(we found that many users did not look at what the starfield display showed them).
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