Week 8
August 6, 2012
The last full 2 weeks are upon us!ย Time definitely flies when you are having fun…a.k.a. working on improving a research tool!
I spent the morning going over the comments from the user survey.ย I would like to share some of the notable comments. Again, I have only received 2….though I have yet again sent out reminder emails to those researchers that had agreed to participate.ย So here’s to hoping for more responses!
1.) Both respondents worked on the NSF-BIO template responses indicated that a community forum and links to more information would be helpful.
2.) One of the respondents indicated that information regarding data standards and metadata standards would be helpful and actually even offered that a chart representing standards such as NetCDF, OpendDAP, FASTA and Shapfile as well as metadata standards such as Dublin Core, Darwin Core, FGDC, and ISO-19115 would be helpful.
3.) One of the respondents also indicated that in certain cases there was too much information regarding the lists of things that could possibly be addressed in each section.ย This researcher argued that when the list gets too long, it actually is more confusing and instead suggested that these lists could maybe be organized hierarchically with collapsing options.
I think that all 3 of these suggestions/comments can be tested for.ย Obviously, as we are in week 8, the chance for actually created and sending out another user survey may not be realistic, however I would love to write another user survey that utilizes some of these suggestions.ย I think that would be a useful exercise and product of this first survey that I conducted.
Looking forward to catching up with everyone sometime this week.
Thanks All,
Rachel