The corporate partners and CTG staff provided training and support to field testers. Each field tester was required to attend one of five three-hour regional training sessions prior to beginning the field test evaluation. During these training sessions field testers were given an overview of the project and its goals and then a demonstration of each application. Each user was assigned a user name and password and shown the role(s) that he or she would have during the test. A workbook consisting of 34 tasks and an opinion survey was distributed and explained. The only hands-on component of the training was practice to make sure testers could sign-in to the Prototype using their user name and password.

The test was conducted from each person’s place of work although a few later reported testing from home for lack of time during the workday. Support was provided for the field tester by phone and email during normal business hours. The support team was able to guide users through any difficulty using the Prototype and was prepared to involve software development teams as needed. However, no issues required the involvement of the software development teams. Online help and Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) were also built in to the Prototype to assist users in answering questions on their own, although it does not appear that these features were used extensively.

For the majority of users this training and support model worked well enough considering the very limited resources available to conduct them. A few users needed more help than the support model could accommodate. From these few users, the support team identified the portions of the Prototype design that caused the most issues and the need for more training in basic Windows and Internet skills. Both of these issues resulted from the limited resources available in the Prototype project. A production level State-Local Gateway would have gone through more than one refinement process, fixed the design issues, and given more time and resources for users to receive additional training.