Captions and Annotations
All of the participants utilized extra features to answer the test questions. Although the questions were designed to force participants to use the extra features, it is significant that all of the participants regardless of their comfort level with the interface did try hyperlinks in the captions to access further information. Furthermore, two of the subjects examined the full text captions and attempted to utilize a search function to find information within the text. One subject was unsuccessful in employing her search because she had her cursor in the wrong frame but definitely had a good concept of how to find the information she required. All of the participants utilized the annotations, however, all were told that there was information in the annotations that was not available elsewhere in the captions or video. Even still, two of the participants had to be directed to open annotations in order to view the additional information (and find the answer to one of the questions).
Three of the five participants stated that it was difficult to attend to captions and annotations at the same time. One participant found it impossible. While participants may learn strategies for viewing captions and annotations such as watching the video more than once or stepping back or forward through segments, our participants seemed to prefer attempting to attend to both captions and annotations. In this mode, however, 3 of the participants reported that things moved too quickly.
Two of the participants verbalized that they liked the captions and one noted that it was great to have the flexibility of positioning.
Hyperlink lists
All of the participants had to be reminded that the hyperlink list existed. The need for reminder may have been compounded by the fact that the Òshow hyperlinks listÓ function on the general tab of the preferences dialogue was not working in the player version used for the evaluation and participants were more inclined to use this dialogue than the working settings menu. Furthermore, only ten minutes of video were viewed by participants and while a hyperlink was displayed in the captions and annotations six times in that ten minutes, only two different links were shown. For this reason, participants were less likely to need a listing of the hyperlinks to help their memory of the links or assist in navigating to the links.
User Errors/Bugs
The three most common user errors were:
The most common bug seemed to be related to the default settings whereby leaving the position of captions and annotations set to default made changes to font size and text type not take. Furthermore, the preview window would show the incorrect text position (compared to where the text was actually showing).
