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Methodology
Evaluation of phase one was conducted on a Hewlett-Packard Compaq TC4200 Tablet PC laptop computer. The tablet functionality was not used. The online course platform Angel was used to model the static HTML pages, as described in section 2.4. The result of this implementation was brought up on the screen and the six student participants were asked to engage in exploring the system after having received a short introduction into the interaction scheme that was conceived by the project stakeholders. The participation sessions were conducted for each participant individually at the participant's convenience. Both experimenters and submitting authors were present during each session. In each session, one of the experimenters was engaging the participant in a contextual inquiry and semi-structured interview after the participant was given time to orient him or herself and familiarize with the interface, while the other experimenter was taking notes. During the interview, questions regarding the understanding of the interaction schema of the information items on the screen were asked and the responses were recorded – this allows a backwards induction so that it can be assessed in which way the presentation of information can fuel an understanding of the presented information itself and therefore ease the interaction with the user.
In phase two, the evaluation was conducted on a Sun Ray 2 workstation connected to a central server hosting the Java applet as well as the GWT application. The Sun Ray 2 was equipped with a 22'' Sun LCD display running at the native resolution of 1680x1050 pixels. Each volunteer participated in a personal session, except two professors that participated in the same session because of time constraints. Each participant was given a brief introduction as to the purpose of the interface they were currently evaluating, followed by an introduction into the specific implementation. Afterwards, they were given the opportunity to explore the interface and after some time encouraged to speak out loud about their impression and thoughts. The evaluation session therefore seamlessly moved into a contextual inquiry mode in the form of a semi-structured interview. All participants were reviewing both interfaces. The participants were introduced to a specific interface by the experimenter that was mainly responsible for implementation of the corresponding prototype. Both experimenters took extensive notes during the evaluation on the participants’ responses, comments, and actions.