This participant's most common goal is "looking up homework assignments."Starting at the CS 3604 home page, Participant #1 moves to the Professionalism Home Page, scrolls down the page, clicks on the "Assignments" link, and then clicks on another "Assignments" link. (Participant Comment: He initially found this path to the homework assignments difficult to follow because it requires him to perform more mouse clicks than he expected and because the link is not very clear.)
(Scenario 2 - Checking the On-Line Debates)
This participant's second most common goal is "checking the on-line debates."Starting at the CS 3604 home page, Participant #1 moves to the Professionalism Home Page, scrolls down the page, clicks on the "Assignments" link, and then clicks on the "Group Debate Preparation" link; this final action brings him to a page of debate guidelines. The second line of text found on this page provides the following instruction: "To connect to the Debates, click here." Participant #1 clicks on the "click here" link and accesses the debate system. This participant also explained that there is a second path that he uses to get to the debate system. Starting from the CS 3604 home page, Participant #1 moves to the Professionalism Home Page, scrolls down the page, clicks on the "Calendar" link, clicks on the "Debates" link near the top of this page to access the debate calendar, and then clicks on any one of the on-line debate's start date to access the debate system. (Participant Comment:The path is too long and unclear; he would prefer that a debate link be located on the CS 3604 Home Page.) (Interviewer Observation: The CS 3604 Home Page has a link to the on-line debate tool, but the link is not obvious to users.)
(Scenario 3 - Checking the Class Calendar)
This participant's third most common goal is "checking the calendar."Starting at the CS 3604 Home Page, Participant #1 moves to the Professionalism Home Page, scrolls down the page, clicks on the "Calendar" link, scrolls down the Calendar of Classes page, and checks the homework due date and class materials covered in each class. Next, Participant #1 clicks the "Back" button twice to go back to the CS 3604 Home Page, clicks on the Careers Home Page, scrolls down this page, and finds another calendar. (Participant Comment: He likes the way that the calendar is presented on the Professionalism Home Page but would prefer that the two calendars provided by the web site be merged together.)