Me Hates This
Thank you for participating in our study about frustration during computer work!
Before you can get started, there is some paperwork to do - you need to fill out and sign a consent form (which you will get from Thorsten) and an online questionnaire.
NOTE: You need the participant ID from the consent form for the questionnaire and the experiment!
Have your participant ID? Good.
Now fill out the pre-questionnaire.
The experiment is divided into two stages:
- the first stage (lasts one week). Those of you with odd participant IDs will get an easy button during that time; those of you with even participant IDs will be able to use the software without the button.
- the second stage (lasts one week). Those of you with odd participant IDs will hand over their easy buttons to the people with even participant IDs. The odd numbers also will now be able to use the software without the button.
If this is now all totally clear to you, please download the application image!
The DMG contains two applications:
- MeHatesThis.app is the main application for the experiment and should be running pretty much all the time on your computer. It will also make an entry in the login items list, so it will be started every time you log in. Since the application regularly accesses the framebuffer you may want to turn it off temporarily if you are playing graphic intensive games or you might experience some slight flicker or lags. The purpose of the whole thing is that anytime you feel angry or frustrated you can tell the application and your computer will capture some data that will help us find out what went wrong.
- If you have an easy button connected to your computer you can just slam the button (with all your anger - even multiple times if you feel like it) to tell your computer that you are frustrated.
- If you don't have a button connected you can still express your frustration by clicking on the menu bar entry for the application.
- MeHatesThis Reporter.app is a reporting tool that at the end of a day/week lets you make some comments about why you punched the button. It is also the tool that you can use to easily email these reports to me. I will remind you regularly via email to launch the reporting tool. Filling out the questions in the reports is optional - you do not need to do it but it would help us greatly if you did.
After the experiment you can uninstall the application by moving it from your Applications folder to the trash and removing the login item under the Users pane of the System Preferences.
If you have any questions or problems with either of the applications or your button hardware, please do not hesitate to contact me!
- Florian Heller, Leonhard Lichtschlag, Moritz Wittenhagen, Thorsten Karrer and Jan Borchers. Me Hates This: Exploring Different Levels of User Feedback for (Usability) Bug Reporting. In CHI '11: Extended Abstracts of the CHI 2011 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1357–1362,2011.
