As with the XOkapi project, users had no problem with the direct manipulation interface, presumably because most participants in higher education are now familiar with mice, buttons, scrollbars and windows. However, there were some areas of difficulty.
One user remarked that there seemed to be a large amount of redundant space in the interface, with the current query terms taking up a disproportionate amount of space. The project team agreed with this criticism and changed the layout to give less space to the query and more to the document, thus creating a better balance.
The experimenter noticed that eight users could not easily find the mouse pointer as it appeared on the opening window. It was a black arrow, which although large was indistinct on a light blue and black display. Its colour was subsequently changed from black to red --- results from the second user test showed that this made a huge difference.
Another problem was that users did not know when a process was still running and when it had finished. This caused them to click the same button several times, generating TCL error messages. The problem was (in part) rectified by having the pointer change to a clock when a process was going on. However it did not completely solve it because users did not always see the clock. For the large-scale field trial the interface logic was changed to ignore multiple clicks.