Nathan Cooley


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Nathan Cooley

Multimedia for the 22nd Century

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HCI

HCI During my last semester at MSU I was able to take a class cover Human Computer Interaction. This course taught me important principles related to designing and researching HCI.For my final project I was part of a group that conducted a study about Google Wave. We created liker scales and had people use Google Wave and then rate their experience. Here are some of the results.
Wave allows you to edit other peoples posts, here you can see that most people did not feel that it was very important, though we would have needed more participants to get a very accurate assessment.	This graph shows that each participant thought that Google Wave would increase their efficiency in some way.	Only one person said that they did not want an account, which is pretty good considering it was still a "preview" at the time.

	Least Appealing Features The group thought that editing someone else's Wave would be the least appealing feature, and while we were right, it wasn't as bad as we thought it would be.
	Over All Impression Here you can see that participants generally had a positive experience with Wave, not as good as it could be, but it's important to keep in mind that the study was conduced while Wave was still a "preview" and most participants had never even used it before.
	New Terminology While not very important for the study I was curious to see how people would react to the new terminology presented by Wave, such as "waving to someone" or "lets wave about it and come to a decision". I found it interesting that for the post part people did not really care, and the fact that 28% chose 3 on the liker scale simply indicates that they are willing to put up with it.
Click here for more information about Google Wave!

Conclusions / Recommendations
Despite the steep learning curve, over all participants had a good experience with Google Wave. Improved efficiency with the embedding function will lead to a better over all experience. Info pop-ups for first time users may be helpful but only if they can be turned off.