Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
Instead, we asked a student who was not familiar with our system to prepare the
document collections for all participants.
With this task, we aimed at finding out if the participants would be able to com-
plete a realistic information integration task more quickly using CoScribe. Obvi-
ously this task goes far beyond simply following a hyperlink (which obviously
takes less time than manually searching the referenced passage). Users had to han-
dle many documents containing not only relevant, but much irrelevant information.
Moreover, the users had to decide on the relevance of hyperlinks, since only about
one third of all hyperlinks linked to passages which were relevant for a specific
question. Finally, the participants were pressed for time (15 min. per document set
for three questions). This setting thus represented a realistic knowledge work task
where a co-worker had pre-structured a collection of documents with regard to spe-
cific aspects.
After the experimental session, we gathered subjective feedback with a question-
naire. This contained 24 items covering the usability of cross-media hyperlinks and
of the pen-enabled display, the perceived proximity between paper and digital doc-
uments and personal information. For the sake of readability, we will present all
statements in their positive form, but the form varied in the questionnaire. Finally,
we conducted a semi-structured interview with each participant to gather qualitative
feedback.
Results and Discussion
Creating and Following Links
After a few minutes of training, all users had learnt
how to use the pen on the display and how to create and follow links. Responses to
an open question showed that the interaction was appreciated as being “easy” (8
persons), “quick” (2 persons) and “highly intuitive” (2 persons). We observed that
all but one participant navigated through the interlinked documents with ease and
confidence as if they had been using the system already for a long time.
In the responses to the questionnaire, creating hyperlinks was judged to be sig-
nificantly easier and faster with the system than in the control setting (Fig. 6.12).
Creating a hyperlink was rated to be very easy
4
in contrast to the value for creat-
ing traditional references which was below average
5
. Alike, creating a cross-media
hyperlink was rated to be significantly faster
6
than creating a traditional reference
7
.
In the interviews, the users valued the tap-and-hold gesture for starting hyper-
links, as this permits a clear differentiation between annotations and the link com-
mand. The gesture was considered to be very easy and quick to perform. This stands
in contrasts to the findings of Li et al. [73] who report higher error rates and larger
task completion times with hold-down gestures. This contradiction might relate to
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