Re: [Myexperiment-discuss] seeking your ideas for improving myExperiment

[Ross Gardler]

On 4 November 2011 12:44, David De Roure <address@hidden> wrote:

...

> 2. In what ways could a myExperiment Android or iPhone app make your life
> better?

The Rave In Context project is seeking to make W3C Widgets templates
available for  general purpose activities such as search and browsing
result lists. The objective here is to be able to provide different
user interfaces for different platforms.

The justification for this work was that people need to do different
types of work in different contexts. So, for example, people are
unlikely to create and upload new workflows using a smartphone, but
they may be interested in reading the social streams around their
topics of interest. While users of tablets might search for new
workflows, groups and epople to engage with as well as monitor
existing streams.

Our justification was that small screens would not be effective in
communicating complex workflows etc.

Interestingly, when doing the UX testing of prototype systems the
users indicated that they would, in fact, be happy to use smartphones
for more complex activities. They indicated that they would be willing
to scroll around images in order to understand the full context of a
workflow and thus would use smartphones for this purpose. Personally I
remain unconvinced, but that's the feedback we got.

I would suggest that the first objective would be to create the
maximum social experience in smartphone apps fist and then, if real
users demand it, add in workflow discovery functionality.

> 3. Would you find Amazon-style recommendations helpful? (Please give
> examples of what would be useful to you.)

You need a great deal of data to make such recommenders work. I'd
suggest more community building facilities within MyExperiement would
be more productive. That is focus on the people rather than the tools.
In small communities people are the best recommenders.

> 4.What's the single thing we could do that would make the site more useful
> for you?

More visibility into the people and their work rather than the
workflows they are working on. My justification is that the workflows
communicate very little about the people and their interests. I was
amazed to discover some of the people on here have workflows of
interest to my work. A simple search didn't turn them up because the
language used in describing a workflow is very specific when our
overlapping interests are at the boundaries of our expertise.

> 5. And finally, would you be interested in helping try out new features as
> we develop them?

I'm not really a user, so can't help here. But if you start enhancing
the API I might be able to do some testing for you, it's nice to have
a system like this for testing my Widget templates.

Ross