- Two videos were presented from the “Annoying Orange” series, each approximately 11 minutes and 22 seconds long.
- It was confirmed that none of the participants had seen either of the videos before.
- 8 comprehension questions were presented at the end of each video, multiple-choice with one correct and four incorrect answers.

Play Write: Video Watching Task

- For the documents, researchers selected two articles on Wikipedia that required copy-editing, each with similar topics.
- Researchers added spelling and grammatical errors to bring the list of required edits for each document up to approximately 190, ensuring that participants would have enough editing tasks for the 13-minute time span of the video.

Play Write: Document Editing Task

- In each trial, participants were asked to watch a video on their laptop while editing a Word document on their phone.
- They were instructed to attend to both tasks, and told their performance would be evaluated by how well they edited the document and how well they answered comprehension questions from the video.

Additional Sections:
- Video Watching Task
- Document Editing Task

Boston College

- Developers conducted a lab study to compare the experience of using Play Write with other traditional mobile editing experiences with Mobile Word.
- Participants were asked to edit a document from their mobile phone while watching a video on their laptop, with the video serving as a proxy for a continuous attention task.
- The study used a within-subjects design with the editing app as the factor.

Additional Sections:
- Participants
- Experimental Tasks
- Protocol

Play Write: Evaluation

Iqbal, S. T., Teevan, J., Liebling, D., & Thompson, A. L. (2018) Multitasking with Play Write, a Mobile Microproductivity Writing Tool. Association for Computing Machinery, New York, 411–422. DOI:https://doi.org/10.1145/3242587.3242611

Multitasking with Play Write, a mobile microproductivity writing tool

- 16 people (M=11, F=5) participated in the study, all of whom worked for a large technology company and were experienced with editing documents on Microsoft Word.
- Each participant had little to no experience editing documents on their phone.

Play Write: Participants

Play Write: Experimental Tasks

- Participants were  given a pre-study questionnaire about their general editing practices, and then were given 3-5 minutes each to practice with either document editing software on a practice document.
- This was then followed by two experimental trials, one for each editing tool.
- At the end of the study, they filled out a questionnaire about which system they preferred and were asked to provide general feedback on both editing tools.

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