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Creative Writing Workshop

Initial User Testing for the Software

creative writing workshop

I ran a small workshop using the software with a few students from the creative writing department. The participants used the sentiment program, and were guided through writing a short piece of expressive writing with a topic of their choice, without any prior knowledge of the nature of the interactions and what would happen. Here are a few key points:

  • The interaction was uncontrolled, and programmed to occur four minutes into the writing process. Because each participant had started writing at roughly the same time, their noticing of the interaction was synchronised and caused a sense of surprise and some amusement.
  • A concern was that the process of falling words would result in a form of disruption that would undermine the value of using this software. However, it was observed that whilst the process of gradually losing words resulted in pauses, it did not deter people from continuing writing.
  • Participants were curious to understand more about what the interaction was, such as emotion, and were surprised when it was revealed that it was negative. Only participant guessed this, and began to explore the interaction further, by purposefully using more negative words.
  • The general consensus was that there was a therapeutic element to the interaction and the empty spaces that were left behind in the text felt intuitively mysterious and this experience could be expanded on.
  • Finally, a number of technical issues occurred. The participants sometimes missed the full impact of using the programs because the negative words were misspelled, or there was a comma at the end of the word and the delimiter only included spaces. This meant many words were not recognised by the system.

Note: This was the first time the software was properly tested by anyone. Now that the bugs have been fixed, it would be interesting to test the software again in a group context.

Are you a writer who is curious about trying out the software? If so, I would be very excited to hear from you: