Jay’s Not Here

I had my first participant come into the lab for my first qualitative study. The session went fairly smooth except for a few wrinkles. I’m studying expert software developers—i.e. people who code to put food on the table. I learned quite a lot:

• An interruption-free environment lets a coder focus on their task so much they can lose track of time and let 3 hours pass. (Ahh, memories of undergrad assignments…)
• My idea of easy can be very, very different from someone else’s.
• Coders don’t like think-aloud experiments. They just want to do things their way.
• I need to make the task even shorter.
• Even though your screen recording software has a crash recovery feature, DO NOT TRUST IT!^[1]
• The last GO Bus going home leaves Union Station at 0040h. Not a good idea to miss that one, lest I want to spend the night downtown…

Now it’s time to go over all the data. Luckily I have all 3 hours worth of source code deltas, browser history, and IDE metadata, despite losing 2 hours worth of video. Some data is better than no data.

^[1]
I made the awful mistake of thinking my data was safe after recording the session. The program was in the middle of transcoding the capture data to a standard movie file and I stupidly decided to close the lid of my laptop to put it to sleep. Of course, when it woke up, the screen recorder crashed, but I knew it had a crash recovery feature that allows transcoding to resume. Well, it did continue, but the last 2h10 of the recording was all green screen. It only salvaged the first 50 minutes.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 6th, 2009 at 8:29 am and is filed under Research. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.