Abstract
'Interactivity', a key buzzword of the information age, has become an
essential goal of many educational, entertainment and eCommerce Web
development efforts. JavaScript-, Java- and Shockwave-applications promise
higher involvement of the learner/user, more sophisticated user
interactions (beyond the usual hypertext navigation), and Web services
that can adapt to the user's skills and preferences ('user modelling').
Although these concepts have been applied in a great number of
instructional CD-ROMs and computer games already, their implementation on
the WWW is still rare. One of the reasons are (often substantial) system
response times (SRT), or 'net lags', enyountered in open networks,
especially for multimedia content. As our studies, among others', have
shown, SRTs beyond a certain duration can impact both the involvement as
well as the emotional state of the user. Though such technical problems as
'net lags' may (and certainly will) be remedied in the future, our
research emphasizes the potential of analyzing the temporal properties of
the human-computer interaction for understanding and improving this
process.
Obtaining quantitative measures (as opposed to qualitatitive data, e.g.
questionnaire ratings) on the WWW is both a challenge and an opportunity.
We developed a JavaScript tool for creating a high resolution,
time-stamped, event-related protocol of the user's navigation within and
between electronic documents, and implemented it to record both the
technology-induced times (SRTs) and the human-dependent times
(decision/action times). It was used in a series of lab experiments as
well as in the interactive educational Web application 'Shakespeare Sonnet
Quiz'. Results emphasize the critical role of 'time design' for realizing
the full potential of interactive applications. Based on 'Shakespeare
Sonnet Quiz', we demonstrate how breakdowns of the interaction-flow can be
diagnosed and interpreted, and how this information can be used to enhance
existing Web sites.
'Shakespeare Sonnet Quiz' can be found at
http://exp.psychology.uni-kassel.de/cgi-bin/quiz.pl
More information is available from the author's homepage:
http://www.psych.uni-goettingen.de/abt/1/hilde/
