I
chose these two following questions because in my opinion this paper itself is
the perfect answer to both of them. It could become a great example for young
researchers who are developing design research and confused about evaluating
the results and presenting the idea.
How
can media technologies be evaluated?
I
think that this paper has one of the perfect examples of evaluation new media
technology. The researchers are applying their technology by checking 3 main
aspects of user usability: effectiveness (the possibility of accomplishing the task with the specific system), efficiency (that implies the quantity of efforts that are necessary to finish the task) and user satisfaction
(this aspect is evaluation the comfort of using the system). But researchers should be very careful and
pay great attention during checking and preparing users for such kind of
studies. For example, as it turned out, when the participants finished the
first experiment and started doing the second one, the researchers could think that they became more experienced (because they had been trained by the first
experiment). But the analysis
showed that the training had no influence on efficiency (but at the same time a significant effect on effectiveness). So it could be a very high potential of a risk of users being confused
by training.
How
can design research be communicated/presented?
The
paper could become a great example of presenting the design research work. The
paper is organized into 7 sections that make the subject clear even for people
who are not familiar with the topic at all (as me;-) [1]:
-introduction
of the main ideas
-design
guidelines along with necessary human touch perception issues
-vibrotactile
coding schemes for a football game
-explaining
the experimental platform along with system evaluation parameters
-presentation
of user studies
-detailed
user test results
-and
conclusions
In
my opinion the structure of presenting is very good - the main focus of it on
the experimental checking- the user studies, because as far as this paper is
presenting new media technology it should be evaluated to prove the quality of
it.
I
have chosen the high quality research paper “Social
Media Recommendation based on People and Tags” by Ido Guy, Naama Zwerdling,
Inbal Ronen, David Carmel, Erel Uziel IBM Research Lab.
In this design paper researchers invented a new application based on social recommendations within item recommendation within an business activity - set of organizations that includes blogs, bookmarks, communities, wikis, and
shared files [2]. The researchers propose a novel method for recommending social
media items based on both related people and related tags. This social software application suite includes seven main social
media applications that are being used: profiles (of all employees), activities, bookmarks, blogs,
communities, files, and wikis [2].
The
researchers evaluated their recommender system through two steps. Firstly, they
conducted a user-syrvey with the sample of 200 users that has been testing about 30 used and 30 incoming tags. They made it to explore the most effective way to build a user’s tag profile. Then they did an extensive user study
that eventually showed that it's very beneficial to use tags for social media recommendation.
The study itself was designed in a specific way - they tried to compare the people-based recommender (PBR), the tag-based
recommender (TBR), and two combinations of these two recommenders (PTBRs) [2]. As far as the evaluation
in this study is mostly based on rating an initial set of recommended items, I would recommend the researchers to try exploring the behaviour of users who regularly access the
system. It could be more challenging.
[1] Réhman, S., Sun, J., Liu, L., & Li, H. (2008). Turn Your Mobile Into the Ball: Rendering Live Football Game Using Vibration. IEEE Transactions on Multimedia, 10(6), 1022-1033.
[2] “Social Media Recommendation based on People and Tags” by Ido Guy, Naama Zwerdling, Inbal Ronen, David Carmel, Erel Uziel IBM Research Lab
At first I didn't understand which paper you were talking about in your first paragraph, however this became more clear when continuing reading “How can media technologies be evaluated?”. I think you have some interesting ideas here that I didn’t think about and I like how you divided it in to 3 main aspects. However this analysis only answers how to evaluate a specific type of media technologies in my mind. Your answer to question #2 How can design research be communicated/presented? I think is spot on and I agree on that the paper could become a great example of how to present a design research.
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