Study Confirmation

Good news, after some waiting permission to carry out my PhD study at the intended site has been granted (the site I wanted as it has a very good wall  mural, which would be perfect for augmented interpretation trials). Hopefully things will progress after I get back from Vietnam. Of key importance is getting the display transferred over to the mural, this will involve:

• Choosing the information points (and taking a reference photo for each point). I intend to ask the staff / volunteers which points they think are really interesting as they will probably know the mural well.
• Writing the content for each point.
• Modifying the android app with the new content (hopefully this should not be to hard).

In terms of conducting the trail days, I was thinking of testing the different versions of the display on different Saturdays (in order to try and capture a similar study population). There is a bit of a time limit at the moment as the property closes for the winter in early November so I need to get the initial two trials in before then. I was also intending to conduct a small survey before the prototype testing, to gauge the site visitors expressed interest in this form of interpretation.

Over the next few days I was also intending to do the small pretrial prototype test of the version of the display I built for the Povey mural. This will be useful as a pretest for the proper study (ironing out any issues with the questionnaires and other study tools). However as I have identified that the mural is not really suitable for the type of display I am testing, the pretrial will be a chance to identify if the users also find this to be the case, and explore what use issues they encountered. As the is not at a site with passing visitors (like the intended study site), I will probably have to ask a small number of students to be test subjects (a.k.a willing volunteers). I was thinking that about three to five subjects should suffice (which is similar to other pretest studies I have read about).