Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

User studies are a critical element of the research program of Fels and others at Ryerson. Typical protocols for formative and summative evaluations such as heuristic evaluation, verbal protocol analysis, video analysis and surveys have been successfully used to collect data from users to date. However, we are finding that much of our current research in evaluating game playability and user reactions to enhanced captions and video descriptions for television and film requires more direct and objective methods. Verbal protocol and recall methods such as post-study questionnaires are not providing sufficient and timely data to understand people's real-time reactions. Because we want to evaluate arousal and emotional engagement as well as usability, we need methods that can measure these variables without required user intervention (such as verbalization). Physiological methods and eye movement are less invasive and more objective methods for collecting this information      It is important to use a video analysis tool such as Noldus which provides more efficient methods for coding and analysis of video data as well as the automatic integration of eye data in this analysis. The Noldus tool is one of the few systems that integrates video data analysis with eye tracking technology. It can also accept physiological data from systems such as Captiv.