Communicative Activity Analysis of a Wizard of Oz Experiment

In this chapter we will describe and analyze a simulation of a factual information seeking system for a subsection of the "yellow pages". The subsection contains information about (i) car hire (ii) restaurants, and (iii) personal insurance. The simulation was accomplished by use of the so-called Wizard of Oz technique. In this technique, subjects who believe they are communicating with a prototype of an automatic information system are, in fact, communicating with another person via a computer terminal. The person who is simulating the system (and is called the wizard with an allusion to the American Wizard of Oz story) has at his/her disposal an information base and a set of preprogrammed "canned" response patterns. The actual simulation was preceded by an introductory session where subjects were given a set of instructions relating to the use of the system and was followed by a session where subjects were interviewed and asked to complete a questionnaire concerning their experiences and evaluations of the system.