Research talk:Re:Flex User Studies

Questions from Ymblanter

1. How many participants do you expect to recruit?--Ymblanter (talk) 16:28, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

   Hi Ymblanter! We want to recruit 5 - 10 participants, which is a fairly standard number of usability studies like this. Jtmorgan (talk) 21:24, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

2. What is your Plan B for the case you will not be able to recruit as many participants as you wish?--Ymblanter (talk) 16:28, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

   We'll use UW students who have Wikipedia experience, probably those who have taken classes from members of the research team that involve studying/editing Wikipedia. Jtmorgan (talk) 21:24, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

3. Do you need experienced Wikipedia users, or would project progress as well if all the participants are newbies?--Ymblanter (talk) 16:28, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

   since the software we're working on is primarily designed to support veteran editors and the kinds of tasks they perform, experience is preferred. Jtmorgan (talk) 21:24, 29 May 2012 (UTC)

• Given that your subject recruitment amount is insignificant, and answers are sound, I would suggest that you go ahead.--Ymblanter (talk) 17:59, 30 May 2012 (UTC)

Comments

Other than Yaroslav's apt questions about desired number of participants and a backup plan, I think this is a sound study. I've participated in on-campus work as a volunteer at UW before, and I think they've covered all their bases. The recruitment method is very unlikely to conflict with any normal community functions or annoy anyone, and I think it'd be just fine to give this study the RCom green light. As a follow up, I'd say that the Foundation is quite interested in how editors interact with visualization tools, and any ability share results with the community (if not the full paper) would be most welcome. Thanks, Steven Walling (WMF) • talk 22:18, 25 May 2012 (UTC)

Thanks, Steven. We will be previewing some parts of Re:Flex at a Wikimedia Brown Bag next month, I believe it will be possible for interested parties outside of SF to listen in via conference call. We plan to make the tool itself, and the dataset it generates, available to researchers and community members. And we fully intend to continue to support this tool, rather than creating another nifty academic one-off project :) Jtmorgan (talk) 21:24, 29 May 2012 (UTC)