Jennifer Lui: Mechanics of Document Formatting: Comparing strategies between undergraduates and graduates

Jennifer Lui is a junior studying Bioengineering at Binghamton University, NY. She spent the summer of 2011 conducting this research under the supervision of Research Advisor Prof. Sri Kurniawan and Graduate Advisor Sonia Arteaga in the Assistive Technology Lab.

Her research explored how people edit documents since few studies on this topic exist. In particular, Jennifer conducted a user study to investigate whether education level affects formatting strategies. Undergraduate and graduate students were asked to edit a Microsoft Word 2010 document with formatting and layout errors. As part of the Think Aloud Method, they explained their actions and reasoning for formatting the document. After transcribing the recordings of the participants and screen movements captured by a screen recorder tool, Open-Coding was used to extract themes associated with how people format documents. Next, these themes were incorporated into Thematic Networks, a method that displays a hierarchy of themes, which shows how global themes were developed by the researcher. As a continuation of this qualitative data analysis, the Hierarchical Task Analysis was done to develop the process participants took to format the document.

When comparing the two groups, it was found that there were differences and similarities in their formatting methods. Graduates were more efficient in fixing inconsistencies, but detected fewer because they did not read the content. Otherwise, the direction and the reasoning behind making changes were similar. Results from this study will provide preliminary insights into the design of a worker prompt for Mechanical Turk workers who will format documents produced by blind people.