Talk:Think aloud protocol

message: Recent reserarch suggests the Think aloud protocol may cause users to adapt their behaviour when searching Google. The Heat Map images below show a similar pattern of users concentrating on a Golden Triangle or F Pattern. 
A similar Golden Triangle or F Pattern was noted in a recent study comparing Think Aloud with Post experience eyetracked protocol.
(I moved the above from the article for discussion.  The author has a clear WP:COI and all his edits to date have been promotional.  As this is newly published research, it probably does not belong per WP:NPOV and WP:OR.  Additionally, the eyetools.com reference is not a reliable source and the useit.com ref is questionable.) --Ronz 17:41, 9 November 2007 (UTC)
thread_title: Moved from article: Recent research

message: I noticed this article says that TAPs were developed by Clayton Lewis - I'm not sure whether this means Clayton Lewis devised TAPs from scratch or if he took something that already existed and worked on it a bit. In the following article concerning the use of TAPs in translation studies, it appears that TAPs began in psychology in the 1930s. Does anyone know any more about this?
http://www.erudit.org/revue/TTR/1995/v8/n1/037201ar.pdf
Jammycaketin (talk) 10:37, 13 March 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Start of TAPs 

message: I found this article while researching Think Alouds for a graduate course in education.  My question regards this statement, "The think-aloud method was developed by Clayton Lewis[citation needed] while he was at IBM, and is explained in Task-Centered User Interface Design: A Practical Introduction by C. Lewis and J. Rieman. The method was further refined by Ericsson & Simon (1980, 1987, 1993)."  
Actually Ericsson & Simon published their Think Aloud research in 1980. "In collaboration with Herbert Simon he proposed a model of the processes involved in verbalization of sequences of thought and showed how some verbal report requirements, such as generations of explanation, have reactive effects on the studied cognitive processes whereas other reporting procedures, such as think-aloud and retrospective reports, valid data on thought processes. This work was initially published in Psychological Review (Ericsson & Simon, 1980) and then expanded into a book "Protocol Analysis: Verbal Reports as Data" (Ericsson & Simon, 1984) which was subsequently revised (Ericsson & Simon, 1993)." http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.hp.html
While it seems that Clayton Lewis published his Think Aloud research beginning in 1985.  "John D. Gould , Clayton Lewis, Designing for usability: key principles and what designers think, Communications of the ACM, v.28 n.3, p.300-311, March 1985[doi>10.1145/3166.3170]"  http://hcibib.org/tcuid/
 
Does anyone know of prior publications by Clayton Lewis that would make Ericsson and Simon the refiners of the Think Aloud Method and not the other way around?
75.186.134.135 (talk) 14:12, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
replies: text: I also found this article when I was doing research for an essay on Think Aloud Protocols, but in Translation Studies. I very much doubt that Clayton Lewis can claim to have come up with the idea (although, admittedly, the word 'developed' is pretty vague and doesn't necessarily mean he was the first to use TAPs, just that he worked with TAPs). In fact, this whole article seems to talk about TAPs as if it's mainly used in software development, which isn't the case. TAPs is primarily a psychological research method and happens to have been applied to a range of different fields, one of which is IT. I'm sure you're right that Ericsson and Simon probably started TAPs - they claim to have been the first to develop complete instructions for using ‘thinking aloud’ (Ericsson, K.A. & Simon, H.A. (1987). ‘Verbal Reports on Thinking’. In: Faerch, C. & Kasper, G. (eds.), Introspection in Second Language Research (pp.37). Clevedon & Philadelphia: Multilingual Matters). I would find it very hard to believe that E&S took the TAPs idea from software development, particularly considering that introspective methods already existed in psychology in the 1930s. Do E&S include Clayton Lewis in any of their bibliographies? Jammycaketin (talk) 20:53, 9 June 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Think Aloud Developer Error? 

message: In 1994, with two colleagues, I wrote a book on the Think Aloud Method. This is no longer in press but freely available from http://staff.science.uva.nl/~maarten/Think-aloud-method.pdf. This includes a section on the history which actually dates back to the 1940's. The part of the book on obtaining the think aloud data is still valid, I think, but computer technology has resulted in many new types of applications and tools for analysing the think aloud data. M.vsomeren (talk) 13:52, 26 August 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  A book