User studies: what are the pain points in reconciliation workflows?

Hi all,

We have already identified some possible improvements to reconciliation
in the past discussions (such as global properties or scores broken down
in multiple features). I think it would be good to gather this sort of
feedback more systematically, by asking and users and service providers
to let us know what they would like to change.

I realise it is not always easy to determine the scope of these "pain
points", especially as an end user. Should a particular problem be fixed
in OpenRefine itself, in the definition of the API, in a particular
reconciliation service, or even in the data exposed by this
reconciliation service? Users are not always aware of the boundaries of
responsibilities behind the scenes.

For instance, we have recently received these comments in the OpenRefine
bug tracker:

https://github.com/OpenRefine/OpenRefine/issues/2083

I think this is extremely valuable and it would be great to get other
reports in the same spirit, even if not all the comments are relevant
for our work on the API. We can then triage them to the appropriate
project and identify the ones that are in scope for us.

I am not sure how to conduct such a campaign for feedback though. We
could set up a web survey, but that would probably constrain the sort of
feedback we get to the narrow frame that we pre-define (and we would
contribute to the ambiant "survey fatigue"). I think it would be
feasible to just request some free text feedback on various mailing
lists and then analyze and triage the results manually, given that I am
not anticipating hundreds of replies.

We can also analyze a lot of feedback that is already public: for
instance, I can think of reconciliation-related issues in the OpenRefine
bug tracker, on the OpenRefine mailing list and potentially on other
platforms?

What do you think?

Cheers,

Antonin

Received on Saturday, 20 July 2019 18:28:54 UTC