Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
10.8.1.1.
General description
At a given signal, one to eight subjects approach a screen and try and find a
particular piece of information. When one of them has identified their piece of
information, they memorize it, raise their hand and immediately move away from
the board. They then write this information on a paper form that was given to them
at the beginning of the experiment. This way, by filming the progress of the
experiment, see Figure 10.10, we were easily able to measure the search time of
each user. This quantity is defined as being the time that separates the user entering
the “scene” of the experiment (i.e. the zone situated in proximity to the display
device) and the moment when they raise their hand.
Figure 10.10.
The subjects come close to the screen and then raise their
hand once they have found the information
The forms completed by the users enabled us to verify the exactitude of the
information we found. Cases of errors were very rare and did not enable us to
establish useful statistics regarding the conditions in which they arose. In fact, the
majority of errors were from a single user, who we will qualify as “distracted”.
We first of all carried out a “control” experiment in which the list of information
was static. Then, we introduced dynamic lists: in this case, the information
displayed by screens only concerns users situated before it. The detection of users
by the system was carried out with the help of the infrared badge system.
