This paper describes a comparative study of three usability test approaches: concurrent thinkaloud protocols, retrospective think-aloud protocols, and constructive interaction. These three methods were compared by means of an evaluation of an online library catalogue, which involved four points of comparison: number and type of usability problems detected; relevance of the problems detected; ov...

Think aloud protocols are widely applied in user experience studies. In this paper, the effect of two different applications of the Retrospective Think Aloud (RTA) protocol on the number of user-reported usability issues is examined. To this end, 30 users were asked to use the National Cadastre and Mapping Agency web application and complete a set of tasks, such as measuring the land area of a ...

This study sought to explore the possible relationship between reading anxiety and reading proficiency and also between reading anxiety and language learners’ use of reading strategies. The majority of studies on language anxiety have been quantitative to date. This study was conducted in two phases. The first phase was quantitative, and the second consisted of a series of case studies using in...

A major concern in Translation Studies (TS) has been on what really goes on in the translators’ head while they are translating (not what researchers claim is going on). Among the techniques utilized in studying such cognitive processes and systems, think-aloud protocols (TAPs) have been widely em- ployed. As a content analysis study, this Qual-Quan mixed methods...

Two experiments are reported that employed think-aloud methods to test predictions concerning relevance effects and rationalization processes derivable from Evans’ (1996) heuristic-analytic theory of the selection task. Evans’ account proposes that card selections are triggered by relevance-determining heuristics, with analytic processing serving merely to rationalize heuristically-cued decisio...

This paper reports on a pilot study that is concerned with the cognitive aspects of reading in an electronic environment. The study focuses on text based electronic documents. A cognitive model for hypertext document reading proposed in an earlier work is here developed and validated with the use of think aloud protocols. The model is concerned with the general cognitive processes that take pla...

The present study focuses on an exploration and identification of design heuristics used in the ideation process in both industrial designers and engineering designers. Design heuristics are cognitive strategies that help the designer generate novel design concepts. These cognitive heuristics may differ based on the design problem, the context defined, and designers’ preferences. In a think-alo...

Spatial annotations form part of the Semantic Annotation Framework (SemAF). The current development SemAF-Space (ISO 24617-7) provides a formal specification but does not provide annotation guidelines. In my talk I will compare this approach with the approach developed for the annotation of preposition senses in Müller et al. (2011), where the annotation guidelines form the annotation specifica...

Usually, by Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs) we mean expressions whose structure and meaning cannot be derived from their component words as they occur independently. In this talk I will discuss a different kind of multi-word expressions that behave as discourse relation markers (DRMs), yet do not seem to belong to well-defined syntactic classes. The apparent open-endedness of these expressions is...

This paper presents the IPS-I-model: a model that describes the process of information problem solving (IPS) in which the Internet (I) is used to search information. The IPS-I-model is based on three studies, in which students in secondary and (post) higher education were asked to solve information problems, while thinking aloud. In-depth analyses of the thinking-aloud protocols revealed that t...