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The purpose of the study focus is to highlight the user-selected vocab word that will be used in each new example sentence generated. The design originally had the study focus as a text-display of the word currently being the focus of all the example sentences. However, due to user complaints about both visibility and navigation control, the study focus display was changed to a drop-down selection, which keeps a history of all the previous study focuses. Additionally, the popped-out drop-down selection also improves information scent. Finally, the study focus word is color coated as light blueteal, which extends to the color coating of the study focus word in the example sentences.
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The user first tried pressing Ctrl-F to search for the word using the browser's built-in search. In our case, however, because we had implemented the site using Silverlight not HTML, the browser can't search the page. After noticing that he wasn't getting when searching via the browser's built-in search, he quickly switched to the search box. The user didn't have any issues locating the search box or using it. After typing in the pinyin for the word, he found the word in the search results, but initially he checked the "May appear in words" checkbox, and didn't click the "make study focus" button. Only after fetching a few sentences and noticing that the desired word was not present did he focus his attention back to the left sidebar, and clicked the "make study focus" button. He clearly noticed the change this time, as he hovered his mouse around the (now highlighted in greenteal) combobox displaying the word in the "study focus" section and faintly mumbled "ah that's it". He then pressed the "fetch next sentence" button to fetch the sentence, as expected.
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