And the penny drops

So I have been absent from my blog for a while, main reason i have been working on my methodology. Over the last four months i have gone through five different methodology designs.

Examples of some of the changes;

showing the user the navigation question on the screen and then taking them to the website to perform the test

showing the question on screen in a pop-up whilst they perform the test

showing them a task and then taking them to the site and testing them on the task after they complete it instead of at the end

grouping the tasks into three sections and testing the user at the end of each section

In hind sight this is a good example that if i was blogging the changes i would now have a nice chronological display of the experiment design changes. Instead i have the old school folders in folders with documents tilted 1, 2, 3 etc so not a good example on my part of organisation.

Last night I have a good one and a half hour chat with my supervisor over the phone. It was in this conversation that the penny finally dropped for me. For ages my blocking point has been what website content will i use to test my hypothesis. I was going to use the ALTC website initially however even when i was designing the experiment for that website there was still a sense of it did not seem right. Everyone was trying to tell me that my thesis was a PHD level thesis, i never quite understood this concept. I have been working in industry since i was 17. I left school in year ten did one year of a full time fashion technology course and started full time work and part-time evening study. Over the last 13 years i have continued to do so. There has been times where i have taken a year here of there to undertake full time study but even then i would be working part-time within industry. I have always seen it vital to keep a balance of work and study as one feeds the other. However a consequence of this was that when it came to my honours I was determined to perform the experiment on a live website as that way it would be relevant to industry.

However what i was doing was forgetting the point of honours and that is to train in the methodology of research and to be able to show proficient understanding in the process of performing research. It is at the PHD level that you need to be performing research that is relevant to industry and is applied in the real world. All of a sudden it was like i get it, once again i am aiming to high and missing the mark. What i need to do is cut back my experiment to testing the concept in a contrived situation that represents real world situations. This made sense as to why all the other navigation honours research i have found uses website game situations such as "locate the secret identity of the marvel action hero" .

By constructing my honours in this way what i do is create a foundation for my PHD which will then take a website and study in the real world the difference between stable and non stable navigation. My honours experiment will now be a website which is liek a random facts game. The thought is that people will move from one section of the website to another by reading the facts. The facts will present questions and answers which will then lead into another section of the website. A great thing about this design is that we are really testing the navigation as the driving mechanism of the website. When i started to think about it we were testing the navigation in a kind of work flow - task driven way which can be likened to how people operate social networking websites such as facebook, Bebo in other words how people operate database driven websites. Considering my many years of work with content management systems (database driven web applications) my heart leaped for joy it was like yes now im really tying my honours research into my passion and love (web applications).

For a while i really was feeling a but lost to explain "it was like i was holding a theoretical ball of research it was in my hands but it was not actually there although i could sense it i could not feel it, once the penny dropped all of a sudden the theoretical ball became an actual psychical thing i could feel it, hold it and bite into it. All of a sudden i feel that im on my way".