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TüNDRA - web tool for treebank research
Usability Engineering Project Hochschule der Medien Stuttgart Wintersemester 13/14
Its a web tool which uses queries to search treebanks and gives linguistic annotated text back that can be modified in a view, which can be used by linguistic-related people to analyze words and texts.
In the following we want to demonstrate its main functions by using it.
To do a search, we have to open a treebank first
Now we can enter our search query. We want to see, how the root word 'Hund' appears in different sentences of this treebank.
Now we want to see, how often the words 'Stuttgart', 'Köln' and 'München' appear and how they stand to each other in a statistic.
The developer of TüNDRA Scott Martens said that there are still complications with user interaction and he himself didn't have any experience with usability engineering.
Scott Martens wants TüNDRA to be easier to use and more intuitive.
Introducing the new TüNDRA
To check TüNDRA's usability we let study participants execute use cases that we defined
In fact we let them execute the examples that were shown before
The evaluation made clear that many things feel natural for the developer, but are very confusing to the normal user. We found some problems and sorted them by their severity.
Problems & Solutions
1. Opening treebanks Users didn't know how to open a treebank. Some couldn't find it at all, others clicked on different fields which they thought would open a treebank.
*actual evaluation footage
Solution Users are told at the beginning of the process to choose a Treebank with definite buttons.
2. Search field problem New users already tried to type in a search query before even choosing a treebank. Therefore they got confused!
*actual evaluation footage
Solution You can't access the search field before selecting a treebank. That makes sense because you're not able to execute a search query without an open treebank.
3. Symbols/Quickstart Users didn't know hat many symbols meant and either randomly clicked on everything or didn't click them at all. Also many people ignored the quick start function!
*actual evaluation footage
Solution Now we use buttons with their name inside of them. Users won't be confused by symbols they don't know. We've also added a Tooltip function, which can be turned on and off.
4. Query Help Documentation The documentation is too full and unclear. Many users felt completely lost and wasted too much time.
*actual evaluation footage
Solution The documentation opens in a new tab as default. With this feature the user won't have to scroll that much and also have the navigation permanently displayed.
5. Statistics Users had difficulties to get to the statistics view.
*actual evaluation footage
Solution If you click on 'Run', the statistics will already be calculated and you can choose between the tree view and statistic view.