Learner #1 skipped most of the video introductions, complaining that they "weren’t interactive enough." He first went to the Imagination section and looked at the Transformations segment of that. The instructions for this section were difficult for him to figure out; the pictoral representation of the directions underneath had to be explained to him. In particular, the axis of rotation and intended degree of rotation was unclear. He had to be told that you could click "new" to go to a new exercise of the same type. He also didn’t do the warm-ups, probably because they were at the far right of the menu bar. He tired of the Transformations segment before getting to them. He said he thought the ability to choose the music was a cool feature.

Next he went to the Guided Fantasy segment of the Imagination section. He cut off the walk, stating, "I would turn that on and lie back in a chair and fall asleep." At the end of the section, however, he stated: "That was cool."

In the Shadow Blocks segment of the Imagination section, he was stuck for a short time before figuring out how to manipulate the blocks. He expressed disappointment at the fact that the program didn’t respond when he had completed the exercise correctly.

In the Magic Theater segment of the Imagination section, he wondered how you could get more images than the three provided by the program. He didn’t try to type in any text to create his own story. Throughout his interaction with VizAbility, he seemed more comfortable with the more analytical exercises.

Learner #1 next went to the Culture section of the CD-Rom and cut off the speaker who was introducing the concept of "idea-logs." He commented in passing; "They have a lot of stuff on here . . . I just don’t know what it is . . .?" When he looked at the Critiquing segment, he noted: "They all look really annoying . . . it’s like your English teacher . . . you can tell this product was done by teachers for teachers." He spent a lot of time chuckling during the Critiquing segment, noting under his breath, "I have a boss like that . . ." Later, he commented: "I’d use this in an interview . . . or maybe with candidates . . . to find out how they take criticism. That’s a really important question."

After Critiquing he went to Readiness. "Maybe I’m missing something here . . ." he noted before exiting the Culture section altogether and clicking on Environments Section. In the Environment Gallery he commented: "So, I’m buying office furniture for a start-up this week .. . this is actually interesting to me . . ." and later "Having a guy in the picture completely colors your interpretation. When he’s in the scene, he biases you. I like the pictures of environments better without the people in them."

Next he went to the Seeing section and clicked on the Hidden Pictures segment. He seemed to enjoy this one. He was focussing hard and answered all of the exercises correctly. He didn’t talk very much during this one and spent a more time on it than he did on other segments. In the Flash Sketching segment of Seeing he noted, "They need a key board thing here because I use the same hand for sketching and for manipulating the mouse." Later, he said "These are like subliminal messages." He didn’t spend much time actually sketching but did click through a large number of exercises. He spent only cursory time in the Attributes and the Seeing Objects segments of the Seeing section.

Next he went to the Drawing section. Again skipping the intro, he looked at the Contour Drawing segment but didn’t spend any time drawing his hand or looking at his hand to try to draw it. "Some of these are pretty interesting," he commented, "but some require too much set-up. Some of these things you would never do on a computer . . . I like the creative exercises and the analytical exercises, but the transition between them is kind of weird . . . I could see myself using this like tetris . . . like to take my mind off stuff . . . but I wouldn’t spend an hour a day on it or anything." Later he noted: "I spend hours a day trying to come up with some slide to visually display business concepts. There’s a kind of a ‘war chest’ of representations that become convention in business. If they went through that ‘war chest’ or those conventions it would help—ways to represent cash flow for instance—everyone else knows those conventions too." And later: "The structure doesn’t make sense—the creative versus the analytical—I don’t see how it fits together." And even later he complained that the videos aren’t interactive: "The person doesn’t even look at you . . . and anyway it’s not like you could convince me that this guy’s an expert on objects anyway . . . it’s such an abstract concept . . . it’s not like they’re an expert who can teach you, it’s just another point of view."

As Learner #1 finished up his interaction with the product he was very disappointed with the lack of assessment. "Where’s my point system?!" he complained. "Show me how I get better . . . well I guess that’s a really hard thing for software to do." He was also disappointed that there was no reward for completing the exercises quickly. "Given infinite time, you could answer every single question . . . the trick is, can you do it fast? But here you aren’t scored for that." Before turning off the CD-Rom, he went back for one last look at Seeing/Hidden Pictures. It was the first one that he had done more than a few of the exercises on. "Maybe these are getting harder?" he postulated. The very last thing he looked at was the Seeing/Pens segment. He cracked up laughing when he played some of the people evaluating the pen. So did we.