Future Research

Given that the current research is an exploratory study, there are a significant number of areas for future research. A number of variations on the procedures that were followed in this research would be useful. In the current research, the majority of tasks carried out by participants in usability testing required them to locate only a single value. Typical casual users of ESD might carry out a wider range of tasks including complex comparisons of values. It is quite reasonable to expect that even casual users of ESD could be looking for trends or patterns in statistical data and it is unclear whether they would find the Abacus prototype suitable for such tasks. Using either the Abacus prototype or a prototype developed in another development environment or with a different combination of technologies, the usability testing could be replicated using a more complex set of task.

The current research has given rise to an initial model of the task of ESD use. This model could be tested in a number of ways. For example, a formal experiment could be conducted to measure differences in performance between two groups of users, one having access to the model and the other not. These groups could be required to carry out tasks similar to those in the current study, using Abacus or some similar tool.