[rkward-devel] feedback

[meik michalke]

hi,

as written earlier, today i gave a presentation at a department for 
statistics. they are considering to switch from SPSS to R (and have already 
done so for the master degree), and RKWard might become their tool of choice 
for the bachelor curriculum, where GUI is a bit more important than IDE.

here's some feedback from the presentation, reduced to the parts where they'd 
welcome some improvements:

- in the workspace browser, "show all environments" should not be checked by 
default, so you only see "your" objects in the worksapce. actually, unchecking 
that box is one of my first actions after a new installation as well ;-)

- in the code veiw, the whole printout section was seen as problematic (at 
least in this context), as it wasn't really clear to anyone that this is just 
what makes the RKWard output. i remember i asked for some options to configure 
this part myself a while ago. no idea how to deal with it. perhaps a more 
explaining comment would help, like "the calculation is done at this point; 
the following code generates the output", or so.

- the regression dialog should be enhanced. we were recommended to look at 
RCmdr's regression module for something they'd love to see in RKWard.

- in general, they wished for a more obvious workflow regarding what can 
further be done with results from some analysis (say, you have just estimated 
Rasch parameters, but no clue that there's a particular plot option for that 
in another branch of the menu). this wish is a bit harder to fulfil, of 
course, but i had two ideas to enhance the situation: the first approach would 
use the "run again"-link feature to recommend common follow-up analysis steps 
in the HTML output, like pairwise t-tests after ANOVA or special plots. 
however, this would limit the availability of recommendations to what the 
original plugin author could think of, and we don't even know what happened to 
an object after the dialog was closed. the second approach would be to 
implement a new entry in the workspace browser's context menu for objects, say 
"next steps". depending on the object class, it would list copies of the main 
menu structure (like data, analysis, plots) which are particularly useful for 
this object class. the mapping for this would have to be defined somewhere, 
perhaps in the dialog XML code, or more centralised in the pluginmap. this 
way, the recommendation would also be available for objects made with other 
plugins and even scripts. where possible, the regarding object could be pre-
filled into the appropriate dialog field. it could be limited to "what you'd 
usually want to do now", if that can be figured out...

overall i think they really liked RKWard already, and highlighted stuff like 
the possibility for pluginmaps to be disabled, especially in a teaching 
context.

well, and there seems to be a problem with our bundle and OS X yosemite :-/

but one problem can be marked as "done":
- the factor analysis plugin should gain support for the MAP criterion, so i 
wanted to get started with a dialog for psych::VSS() some time soon. i just 
saw now that i already did this :-D i must check if that version has not been 
released yet...


viele grüße :: m.eik

-- 
  dipl. psych. meik michalke
  institut f"ur experimentelle psychologie
  abt. f"ur diagnostik und differentielle psychologie
  heinrich-heine-universit"at d-40204 d"usseldorf
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