Testing for WikiWolrd was conducted at the Stanford University Quad. Participants were randomly selected from people who visited the quad.
- There were two conditions for assesment study.
- Both given pre and post surveys. These surveys asked the user about their feelings towards Asking questions, visiting historic sites, and if anything would stop them from asking questions
- Both groups were asked to explore the quad. One group did so without WikiWorld the other with.
- During the exploration of the quad we encouraged the participant to think outloud. We made sure to write down all all of the user's thoughts and insights.
- After 15 minutes of exploring the site both groups were asked "What can you tell me about the Stanford Quad?"
For the first round the participants in both conditions performed about the same. However, the condition that was provided with an Ipod touch contaning WikiWorld quiclky started to provide more information about the quad. This can easlity be attributed to the fact that as time passed the questions and answers of previous users were available for others to review.
All participants who used WikiWorld wanted to check up on the questions they asked (This implies an investment in WikiWorld and with it an investment in asking and answering questions in a place).
Some participants (70%) sought more information about what they asked after using WikiWorld. They reported using other sites like google and wikipedia to get answers to these questions.
A fair number of students noted wanting to use WikiWorld at other sites. This occured both during the think aloud, and during the post survey.
These findings are very favorable and suggest that WikiWorld has met it's objective.