It’s All About The Tasks…

Since January 2023, the Move team focused on constructing conversational tasks and an experimental protocol to test the usability and effectiveness of the Move interface. In taking this take on, the team quickly realized that we needed to figure out the ideal amount of time and exposure participants needed to:

1. Familiarize themselves with the interface. Participants need time and exposure to figure out the:
   1. Availability of items 
   2. Placement of items 
   3. Meaning of items
2. Understand their communicative roles
   1. What is it like to be an augmented user?
   2. What is it like to be a vocal communicator in an interaction with an augmented user?
3. Get comfortable with their communication partner
   1. We are not always polite conversational partners! There are times when the interaction calls for you to be rude, interrupt, and hold/take over the conversational floor. Participants need time (and instructions) to do this naturally.
4. Learn how to be creative and flexible with the interface
   1. It is easy and natural to look at the items on the PEP interface and view them and issue them as single units with a fixed meaning, however, the interface can offer a lot of opportunities if you connect items and if you view items as having multiple meanings or uses. 

Once the team had these four ideas in mind we were better able to instruct our participants before the interaction began. A major “lightbulb” moment for us was when we showed our participants a model interaction before they started conversing with one another. After showing a video model, we could see the interactions changing.

INSERT VIDEO HERE (this is the video Antara made for the conference)

Our next step will be to construct conversational tasks that maximize the use of the PEP interface and give many opportunities for the augmented user to take control of the interaction. From our trials and errors of experimenting with different conversational tasks, we have learned that our tasks must:

1. Give the participants a clear motivation or conflict 
2. Give the participants a problem to solve or a resolution that they must come to 
3. Have some information that is known to one communication partner and not to the other