User Testing = Picking Holes

Today people were asked specifically to ‘pick holes’ in the concept as it is easier for people to see what is wrong rather than suggest what might be right.

There were no major issues raised or functionality that had been omitted but there were a few perspectives that had not been considered.

‘Where is the project set?’ – The concept was initially aimed at the next evolution of the web where the system would have a knowledge as well as an understanding of the content and the context. Since then it has been re-branded as a step between now and then as to be functional, the concept needs to have the next evolution in place and as such people may not be able to relate very well.

‘What about bad data?’ – The toolbar relies on meta-data at the current level of the internet, data about data, so if there was a ‘bad’ meta tag either accidental or malicious there could be incorrect generation of links. The solution to this is a system by where each sentence is evaluated at a time and a positive or negative number associated with it based on whether it matches the rest of the content or not. The same applies to any other data that is searched. The page is then given a total and a decision is made as to whether the page is ‘safe’ or ‘unsafe’. These are displayed depending on the safe-search preferences, similar to Google. All this would be done by a crawler that indexes websites and their content, like the way Google and other search engines index.

‘Is it social, can I comment or rate?’ – No it is not. The problem with social networks and searching is that the social aspect of it would detract from the functionality of the search. There is no direct user interaction with the information provided other than a passive observation of it. Users can not comment, ‘like’ or ‘dislike’ links generated, again similar to how the Google search works. The main function of it is to provide and answer to a search query. The main function of the toolbar is to automatically link sites together to make the browsing / searching process much more fluid and natural.

The development of ‘extras’ continues but will not be fleshed out, more added as a chapter in the report about possiblities, extension and the future.

• Evaluation
• Final Major Project
• Picking Holes
• Relative Search
• Semanitic Web
• Toolbar
• User Testing