Re: [Heartlogic-dev] help boxes

[Joshua N Pritikin]

On Sat, 2005-03-26 at 14:23 -0600, William L. Jarrold wrote:
> On Wed, 23 Mar 2005, Joshua N Pritikin wrote:
> > As I see useful explanations go by on the mailing list, I am copying
> > them into context help boxes on the OHL web site.  The help boxes appear
> > as a [?].  If you click them then the full text appears.  This seems
> > like a better approach than writing a manual which nobody will
> > read.  ;-)
> 
> Sounds like an excellent idea for user interfaces in general.
> 
> But, we loose experimental validity if we vary how items are presented to 
> subjects.  If some people click on the help boxes for a given item
> and some do not this is an added variable that adds noise to ratings.

Ah, OK.

Parity check: This is similar to the problem of some people reading the
instructions and so people skipping the instructions, but at least we
shouldn't make it seem optional by using a popup help button.

Parity check: On the other hand, a popup help box explaining the meaning
of the statistics doesn't seem to introduce any problem.

If these issues seem obvious then feel free to reply with a single word.

> Also, I do not think that the average research participant should see how 
> other people are making ratings.  I think that a given
> participant's judgements should be based stricly on what they think.  They
> should be afforded the ability to see what the average other person was 
> thinking.

Uhm, I'm not sure I understand you here.

Are you saying that it is OK to show the participant an _average_ of
other ratings but it's not OK to show them the other ratings in a more
detailed way?  Is it too much to show the standard deviation?

> I think our main goal is to collect data to provide feedback for the 
> improvement of a AI based model of social cognition.  Therefore we
> should focus on experimental usage.

Yes, certainly.  The devil is in the details!

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