News-All

There's now a new version of the Web Survey Toolbox up. This is a beta version introducing some new features and a new front end.

There are now with many more new features to help you track your project and integrate your research tools in one place.

Features

• Track Issues/Bugs/Tasks. Integrated with your own Bugzilla or JIRA.
• Collect Research Findings. Gather points from papers, Heuristic Evaluations, Ethnographies, User Testing, etc., into one location.
• *Progress Reports:*Get predictions on when the project will be finished. With one click, see an agile report that shows how much work remains to be done on any particular project. The report will run a statistical regression analysis to predict when the project will finish.
• Draw diagrams on the web. Draw any kind of Storyboards, Task Analyses, State Machines, etc. (only if you have installed a license for mxGraph )
• Run Web Surveys. Using Web Survey Toolbox, you can track, administer, and run surveys.
• Analyze most frequently discovered problem areas. Coming Soon: Look at reports and graphs of your problems sorted by topic and area.

What does it do for my design team?

• One stop for all your research findings. Keep your surveys, issues, diagrams, and the planning for how to accomplish them all in one place so you can showcase your design, how you made those decisions, and how the development is coming along all in one place.
• *Prevent unintended side effects of a design change.*Have you ever reached into your crowded medicine cabinet or cupboard to pull out one thing, but you pulled another item out or knocked a second item over? When you make a design change without analyzing it, you risk knocking something else over without seeing it. This system ties all of your research and analyses together so that you can see how one change will affect other design lessons.
• *Use Bugzilla or JIRA or your own other Issue Tracker for tasks and bugs.*This connects to your own issue tracker so that you don't have to switch systems. It tracks additional information about each issue, like data points and findings associated with it.
• Interconnected data.*When you are looking at your research findings, you can track it backwards to where it came from, and track it forwards to what design tasks came out of it. *Coming Soon: When you print out a storyboard, you can also see the incomplete tasks and bugs that the developers are working on for each screen. You can track your development progress through any diagram.
• *Connect the design to the development to the planning and progress tracking.*You can create agile reports and graphs from your data in issue trackers to see how your progress is coming along. Unlike other systems, you can use your current Bugzilla or JIRA to track your issues and see your progress relative to that data.

After significant downtime on our web server, Web Survey Toolbox is now back up, thanks to the fabulous hosting at Open.Jira.Com by Atlassian. They are hosting open source projects on their servers for free. Thanks to Atlassian for sponsoring this project hosting!

We're taking the new wiki live! We intend that this eventually replace our current webpage completely. Feel free to help us convert pages to Confluence.

I do want to fix the URL so it will be a WebSurveyToolbox URL, but that may have to come later, because the server we're using is shared with other projects.

The manager has a new look and feel, thanks to last fall's intro to HCI Team, John (Cole) Jitkoff, Laura Treichler, Kayre Hylton, and Michele Clarke, and Saagar Patel (who implemented it). Take a look and let me know if you have any comments. I hope to get a new version up that uses this very soon -- it's just about stable.

I've discovered Blikis. And, Confluence, a comparatively good wiki. I've seen a bunch of them for other servers, but I've tended to prefer JSP since this project is already a JSP/J2EE project, so it's easier to maintain only one server technology.

We now have several test wikis up. See Confluence for more information.

I hope to expand this site and reduce the documentation on the previous website and make this the dominant one, so that we will more easily be able to have Developers edit the documentation pages and comment on them.

For one, the comments are a helpful area just like they are on the MySQL pages. And second, I believe that our user base as a whole will be better for fixing and improving documentation than an individual maintainer.

It's time to make our documentation editable, and easier to fix by the whole community. We'd like your help identifying areas we need documentation, and your help writing it.
(Developers aren't always the best at writing explanations about their own software, so don't leave this to us!)
So, welcome to the Web Survey Toolbox wiki.

First, we're trying to compare several different tools. See more about that here. You can compare this to the SnipSnap test wiki.

So, feel free to help out and add documentation! We want to know what your frequently asked questions are, what the outstanding issues are, and the answers to them. Write them here -- feel free.

Post your comments about Confluence vs. SnipSnap here.