I've been mentioning for a while that a big part of the plan for the next few months is evaluation of specific affordances through somewhat more rigorous user research. Here's the plan for that:
January
Codify the non-verbal communication design into three testable interfaces, plus one control. Implement them using the existing backend on four forks of the Pith codebase.
Experimental design.
Get experimental design approval from IRB to go forward with testing.
February
More IRB?
Pre-test and deploy interface variations.
Testing.
March
Review results, create second interface iteration with turn-taking mechanism.
Implement.
Approval from IRB for any changes made to experimental design.
Testing of second iteration.
April
Repeat of March's plan for a third iteration with modified affordances from the results of the first two iterations.