Outline of Class 25: Human Factors, Concluded

Miscellaneous

• Sunil and Amartey are presenting The Many Body Problem in class today. Their outline can be found at http://www.math.grin.edu/~sitaula/presentation/
• You are required to do an in-class presentation. There are only four weeks left, so if you haven't signed up yet, you should do so soon.
• I'm planning on offering an independent study on "Designing Multimedia Exercises in Scheme and Java" next term (Spring 1998). The goal will to write multimedia libraries and exercises for 151 and 152. Let me know if you're interested.
• There's a slight chance that I'll offer an independent study in digital libraries and information retrieval either next term or next year. Let me know if you're interested.
• I have some funding next semester for student programmers to develop web tools in Perl or Java. If you're interested, let me know.

Comparison to other tools

• Rather than implementing Project Clio, we might instead look at some existing web analyzers and see how well they support our goals.
• Some include (thanks to Ryan for the help) ...
  • wwwstat, which can be found at http://www.ics.uci.edu/pub/websoft/wwwstat/
  • gwstat, which draws graphs from the output of www stat. It can be found at http://dis.cs.umass.edu/stats/gwstat.html
  • FlastStats, a multi-platform analyzer http://www.maximized.com/products/flashstats/
  • Infotivity, at http://www.infotivity.com
  • CVM, at http://www.cvm.com/1096/webanalyz.html
• Some indices of such tools include
  • http://www.yahoo.com/Computers_and_Internet/Software/Internet/World_Wide_Web/Servers/Log_Analysis_Tools/
  • http://hyper.collatech.com/HyperNews/get/www/log-analyzers.html
• A performance rating of web analyzers can be found at http://www.uu.se/Software/Getstats/Performance.html
• Read the documentation and see how they might be used to answer the following questions ...
  • Can I determine paths through my site? If so, how?
  • Can I compare usage from different countries? If so, how?
  • Can I do incremental analysis of site usage? If so, how?
  • How hard is it to install and use?
  • What basic requirements does it have?
  • ...

User Testing

• If we were to continue with Project Clio, what testing might we do next?
• We could build cardboard mockups of our different interfaces, and let people comment on them.
• We could make animations of our different interfaces, and let people comment on them.
• We could find similar tools, and test using them ...