The DiaSpace project in Bremen is running a brand new quick (5 minute) online web study into how people give route instructions in dialogue. This will be our final call for participation so we hope you can take this study!
The goal is that our findings will help us develop more responsive wayfinding systems so that people who can’t manually control their wheelchairs can interact via dialogue instead. Another application which we’re working on is about helping elderly people find objects in their home by describing where they are in an understandable way. So it’s all in a good cause!
Please participate, and just as important, please forward this email on to your friends! We’re really having a hard time getting enough participants who are native English speakers, as DiaSpace is based in Germany. The only conditions for participation are that participants be native or very fluent speakers of English and 18 years old or older, and not visually or cognitively disabled.
Here’s the link to the experiment.
The experiment only takes 5 minutes, and if you’re using Windows Vista, you’ll need to run it on Firefox, as it won’t work on Internet Explorer for Vista. (It works on Internet Explorer for other operating systems than Vista though.)
[I completed it and I assume it worked fine in Google Chrome.]
It also really is a very short experiment.
FWD seems to have boosted the signal significantly! The site said to try back again in 5+ minutes.
Maybe I’m being slow, but I just tried to do the experiment and found it very difficult to make any sense of. By the time I’d figured out what I think I was supposed to do and started typing, the time limit was up. :/
Its not just you, p-tm: I wound up giving up.
It may be worth contacting the folks who did the experiment to let them know that. Part of the purpose of it, as I understand it, is to give feedback on how people give directions and instructions.