This week I finished up most of the experiment platform and hosted the study publicly through UMD’s UMIACS department. The challenge with finishing the platform for the qualtrics section was working on the randomization aspect, and for the task section was storing logs and publicly hosting the website on UMD’s server due to the amount of steps and permissions required. Since I also stared to recruit for the pilots this week, I also needed to make sure all the accompanying documents to run the study were all set; the documents inculded a video session script and several data collection organization documents.

We also decided to switch our theasurus to the Small World of Words set as it is extremely recent, contains a greater breadth, and US participants. This change meant that we needed to change the writing in the paper a bit, and change a few of the colors and shapes that we had originally picked.

Unfortunately, due to the amount of changes that we kept making to protocol and the development of the experiment platform, reading papers has been placed on the back burner a bit. However, I intend to get back to it as soon as possible. I’m aiming to focus more on reading/writing once the pilots are over and there is no longer any heavy development.

Next week, I plan on making the remaining edits to the experiment platform and workflow based on the feedback that I recieved from Dr. Battle and Hannah. I will also make the cosmetic changes, adding new feature that were suggested (editing the insights button), and fixing the 404 errors that arise from the published public version by UMIACS. I will also continue to recruit for the pilot and conduct all of the pilot sessions next week. This will allow us to identify any bugs or workflow hiccups. We will also decide whether or not to CHI and therefore postpone excuting the study to the fall.