Experimenting on interface design

This paper focuses on the choice of methods used to explore the interface design with the aim of increasing the number of interactions and enhancing social presence in an online environment. The research about interface design comprised four field-based experiments. The experiments focused on the design of different social facilities, but shared many similarities in terms of data collection and analysis. In addition, this paper describes how the online courses were designed and explains the experimental procedures common to all four experiments. Moreover, this paper discusses some of the challenges involved in conducting `real' life experiments on interfaces in an online environment. Some of these challenges, such as students dropping of the courses and participants meeting in other face-to-face courses, do not have simple solutions. Others, such as technical problems should be carefully considered before the experiment starts. Furthermore, `real' life experiment implies in less control over the variables. For this reason, the combination of qualitative and quantitative methods of analysis should be considered.