Recommendation

The following are our re-evaluated recomendations after having completed the user studies.

Recommendations:

It is our recommendation that the following be improved/added in a redesign of VizAbility:

1. Assessment

Gaming-type assessment is not appropriate for VizAbility, but perhaps a set of guidelines for self-assessment would be helpful. Since assessment of visual thinking can be grossly subjective, we recommend a system which makes assessments relative to the users. This can be accomplished by having the user rate preliminary sketches they make and their success on various exercises and then use these rating as a reference point for other activities.

2. Relevance to particular users

Make the applicability of visual thinking more relevant by constructing different versions of VizAbility that cater to different demographics of individuals. These versions would use similar methods but would contain different content that was appropriate to the group it was constructed for (i.e. teenagers, business people, artists, mechanical engineers, doctors, etc.)

3. A web component

Though none of our users suggested the construction of a web site, we feel this to be an important addition to VizAbility because of the pervasiveness of the WWW. The Internet is becoming so common that the next generation will not consider it to be a novel technology but instead will take it for granted and expect all technology to live in the WWW. Software such as VizAbility, if there are hopes for it to be used after five more years, will need to provide users with online elements where they can communicate with other users, share experiences, and download/upload new exercises that will make it a dynamic environment which will permit change that will be able to address the relevant issues of the day.