This week I finished the final edits the experiment platform (surveys and task) after a couple of revisions. I also recruited for and conducted all most all of the pilots for our experiment this week. The pilots were insightful and provided a good perspective of the bugs that remain in the system, survey errors, and overall feedback on the study workflow and process. The most surprising issue that arose during the pilot was a lagging issue with one pilot participant that was in the US; this made us realize that fast enough internet connection is vital for the experiment to be conducted due to the hefty processing required to render the visualizations in the Voyager platform.

In terms of development, I finished adding the editing of insights button to the task platform that the participants will be using if they need to go back and add to change the insight they made.

During a meeting this week, we decided not to submit to CHI and focus on gathering quality data due to this study being experimental. We had really wanted to push for completing the study by the end of 10 weeks, however it took much longer than expected to finalize the experiment protocol. Though this took extra time, we are highly confident in our protocol for the experiment and feel that we have considered many of viewpoints that this research can be taken from due to the amount of internal and external review.

Next week, I plan on conducting the last scheduled pilot session for the study. I will also make sure to identify if there are any other bugs left in the system. The main focus of next week is to write up the DREU Report which will be a shorter version of the full paper that I plan writing to submit to a conference in the future. I will also look at the pilot data that I collected and write up a couple of to do’s that will need to be done right before we conduct the study with participants in the fall.