-- JosephDung - 31 Oct 2010
The objective of the "Just What do They Do" project is to study how different types of people actually use tools like Tapor.
RESEARCH STATEMENT
1. INTRODUCTION
The project “Just what Do They Do” attempts to better understand how people use Text Analysis tools and for what particular purposes. It also tries to ascertain how these tools can be better improved to make it further accessible and useful to users. There is a need to understand how current users utilize the various text analysis tools and for what purposes; to identify where the tools are lacking or limited in meeting the user’s needs or expectations; to suggest or recommend other similar tools to users who might find them useful; to expand the user base by making others aware of the relevance and capabilities of these tools; to refine the tools based on a continuous iterative feedback with the users.
2. TOOL USAGE
So many text analysis tools were developed by different owners to suit their own personal needs. Over time other people found the same tools useful and started using them too. However, as the original tool developer moved onto something else, the functionality of those tools was not improved. Eventually when bugs were eventually found by users, very little was done to correct it because the original developer was busy with something else and has forgotten about the code structure of the tool he had developed. Furthermore since these tools were not open-sourced other developers were limited in how they could contribute to enhancing the tool’s functionality. It is becomes commonplace to find users giving up on tools because of these underlying concerns. To a large degree, a lot of supported tools for Text Analysis at Tapor have found some use amongst the academic community. There could be other types of users outside of the academic community and this project is an attempt to delineate them as well. These set of users maybe newer and keen to experiment with a variety of tools that are out there. The project is an effort to identify how these different set of people use these tools and better understand from their feedback how the tools could be improved.
3. USER SAMPLE
The project aims to identify how the larger community uses Text Analysis Tools and what profiles they fit in by first taking a small user sample and running usability studies with them. Usability studies would require some neutral unfiltered feedback by the user sample. To eliminate any biased feedback, it is preferred that these set of user-testers be completely new to the tool’s interface and functionality. These users could be recruited from the University and other places; and they would be required to sign off to a Data Use Agreement and other Ethical agreements before being allowed to participate in the usability studies. The Data Use Agreement is to cover the bases about issues surrounding the use of any Copyrighted material and also around the materials collected after the usability studies. Other ethical concerns that the user sample will have to agree on is on having their logins tracked and identified with them, or being observed as they work their way through a tool’s interface. It is hoped that the questions and challenges faced by these small user sample is a reflection of what the larger community also faces and that their experiences and feedback will guide the iterative improvement of the tools.
4. RECOMMENDING TOOLS
One key part of improving the tool’s functionality is to have a recommendation engine that suggests to the user other tools with the same or slightly different capabilities that he or she might find useful. This feature may be based on how popular a particular tool is with current users as tracked by actual usage, votes or reviews. But to be able to recommend other tools, this feature may also need to understand:
i. What tool the user is currently using
ii. Or what type of tool the user is searching for
iii. What are the limitations of the current tool if any
One of the usability goals in the “Just What Do They Do” project is to integrate a social component for tool discovery that other users would find useful. This is one strategy for expanding the user base for these tools: as more discover tools through recommendations and also earn about particular features.
5. ITERATIVE DEVELOPMENT
The work-flow model chosen for this project follows for a flexible iterative development model where important user feedback guides the development of the project’s structure. In doing so, many tentative designs and approaches can be discarded for simpler approaches and techniques that readily work. A lot of the input would come from users, as well as the developers of these tools. It is hoped that this unit testing approach will help to consolidate adopted techniques that work and to save time developing and testing these tools.