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Section: Software and Platforms
TouchStone
Participants : Caroline Appert [co-correspondant] , Michel Beaudouin-Lafon, Wendy Mackay [co-correspondant] .
TouchStone [8] is a platform for designing, running and analyzing the results of controlled experiments (Figure 5 ). While it focuses on experiments comparing interaction techniques, it can be used in a wide variety of contexts.
The Touchstone Design platform allows an experimenter to specify the factors, levels and measures in a controlled experiment, supports blocking and counterbalancing of trials and calculates how long it will take to run the experiment. Experimenters can compare the trade-offs between different experiment designs. The platform produces an XML file that serves as a protocol for the experiment and can be used as input to the Run platform.
The Touchstone Run platform provides a framework for implementing and running an experiment and collecting performance data. The flexible plug-in architecture supports various input devices and interaction techniques. The XML script from the Design platform can be run directly or edited to accommodate needs from specific experiments.
Log data from the Run platform can be analyzed by standard statistics tools such as JMP, R or Excel. In future, we hope to create a more elaborate Touchstone Analysis platform that will generate analysis scripts based on the output of the Design platform.
Members of InSitu use Touchstone for a variety of experiments and Students in the Research Masters (M2R Interaction) have been using it to design and implement experiments since 2011. Touchstone is available at http://code.google.com/p/touchstone-platforms/ under a BSD License.
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ACM: H.5.2 [User Interfaces]: Graphical user interfaces (GUI)
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Software benefit: See W. Mackay, C. Appert, M. Beaudouin-Lafon, O. Chapuis, Y. Du, JD. Fekete and Y. Guiard (2007) TouchStone: Exploratory Design of Experiments. In Proceedings of ACM CHI 2007 Conference on Human Factors and Computing Systems. ACM, pages 1425-1434.