An Investigation on the Usability of Socio-cultural Features for the Authoring Support During the Development of Interactive Discourse Environments (IDE)

Though there have been significant developments in authoring tools for interactive narratives as well as a growing number of models explaining narrative meaning production, there is still a lack of understanding around what type of authoring support is required that can facilitate authors to handle the complex environment they develop by maintaining a high content and experience quality. In this paper, we present an investigation that aims to establish relations between individual information needs and navigation behaviour, which can be used as patterns to support authors in the design and development of interaction processes for Interactive Discourse Environments (IDE). A prototype of an argumentative discourse environment has been developed, in which participants can explore information resources in various media representations and complexity levels to gain better insights on climate change. The navigation behaviour has been tracked, and qualitative interviews have been performed to gain deeper insights in the relation between personal information needs, resource preferences and investigation behaviour. The findings of the analysis show that socio-cultural attributes can be identified that correlate to certain navigation patterns. We also show how those patterns can be made available as content and engine consistency checking devices in an IDE authoring environment.