This paper presents the development of an electronic lab guide book, the resulting design methodologies that contributed to its success, and results from a formative test. The authors set out to develop a system that would allow the automatic capture, comparison, and publishing of data generated during chemistry experiments.
To understand the functional requirements of such a system, the project team conducted interviews with chemists, in addition to ethnographic observations of lab experiments. However, the authors felt that neither approach provided sufficient information.
The authors identified two problems that were hindering their abilities to design the system: time and domain knowledge. The length of time of real experiments made real-time observation impractical. Additionally, observations were not beneficial because of they lacked the domain knowledge needed to identify good and bad practices. Therefore, the authors developed an approach to bridge these gaps, called "Making Tea". According to the authors, "Making Tea is a design/elicitation by analogy." The process works by substituting tasks that are too time-consuming or complex to observe with a situation that is more manageable from both a time and knowledge standpoint. In this study, the project team observed chemists making tea in an experiment in order to observe behaviors and language that they could understand and transfer that knowledge to the larger design issue.
The authors also conducted a formative study using Andrew Dill's model of Process, Outcome Affect (POA). They set (and achieved) a benchmark that "within ten minutes of first time use, the system would 'go transparent:' the chemists would be able to focus on their work and simply use the system as they would a lab book."
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