Our prototype was built using HTML and Javascript. Originally, our group decided to use Axure as our main prototyping tool, but changed our decision when we realized there would be too many limitations using Axure alone, especially regarding video function. When interacting with the prototype, users can add and scroll through both comments and timestamped annotations, watch an embedded video with standard YouTube player controls and select hyperlinked video segments to traverse different portions of the tutorial.
We learned from our field study that these functions were often used by participants while watching an educational video. Therefore, they would be important to include to thoroughly test Task 1 (completing an entire task in a video). The prototype also contains all the functionality we plan to test for Tasks 2 and 3 (finding specific annotations).
There are both vertical and horizontal aspects of our design. Comments and timestamped annotations can be made with the prototype. However, if a user were to add a timestamped annotation, it does not actually give the current playing time of the video, making this functionality horizontal. We decided that this is acceptable for our design, since testing users on their ability to add comments and annotations is no longer being tested as one of the tasks in our experiment (although we initially planned to test the process of adding comments/annotations, we decided to no longer pursue this due to time constraints and experiment complexity). Furthermore, video segments have been decided in advance by our team. They are not generated based on users access patterns of the video and videos queues (i.e. screen transitions, long pauses), as they would be ideally in a fully-functioning design. We decided that it was also important for video annotations to update automatically when a new segment is reached. We wanted users to see that annotations are specific to each segment and observe if their interaction with these segments affected their ability to complete the tasks in the experiment.
It was also important that our prototype had a somewhat professional appearance. Since users will be tested using both our interface and YouTube, we did not want them to feel that our design was less serious or professional, and judge it based on this fact alone.