Trying to figure out my design!

Mood:  irritated
Now Playing: the noises of the house and the housemates
Topic: LP Software
I’m trying to figure out why I made the glass-box the way it is … that is, why I don’t show all the steps rather than ask them to click iteration for each … and for the life of me I can’t remember why. I’ve checked my meeting notes but not able to see anything there or either in this blog. I think the reason it’s because I inherited the style from the expected-values pilot study, since I did it that way for each section in the expected values.

Well, so in fact the glass-box may not be completely glass-box -well its in a sense, but it doesn’t show all the steps with one click, you’ve got to do several clicks to get all the steps. I felt and I vaguely remember I did it this way so, it would be somewhat mid-way between the OB and the BB. I think I had two options, I could have made it more BB looking (i.e. one click and just all the steps shown) or more OB looking (click iteration for each of the steps to appear). I guess at the time I was thinking about the amount of interaction the student had withe the software and with GB they had more interaction. So, is it really GB? I think it is, it’s GB with interaction. Perhaps in future studies, one can look at GB with and without interaction.

Now, why did I choose GB with interaction rather than GB without interaction … this is what I’m uncertain of. I know I wanted it to be closer to OB but why? Well, I had two choices really, and I wanted to end up with a Latin square design … so only could do three anyhow. I think I wanted to look at whether the level of interaction would affect how the participant uses the software and as I had already drop one level of interaction in the OB, this was a compromise situation. In the GB with interactions, calculations were shown at each step and still maintains the phenomena of a GB. I don’t know if that is a strong case – but there it is. So, we really have three levels: no interaction (BB), some interaction (GB) and lots of interaction (OB). So, it is somewhat on a scale. We can also have it has no steps (BB); steps shown in a modular fashion (GB); and steps determined by user and shown in a modular fashion (OB).