August is normally a quiet month, so we've taken the opportunity to make some further advances in the Recollective feature set. Chief among them are improvements to the Poll tool which were pushed live yesterday evening (6 Aug).
Improved Poll Task Type
The Poll task type was one of the very first we released back in 2011 and we've had some great feedback about how to improve it. In this release we've expanded it's capability to include follow-on actions and new choice options.
- A "None of the above" and an "All of the above" choice in single and multiple choices polls respectively which remains on the bottom of the list when options are randomized.
- The ability to define actions per poll choice (in a similar way to the Prompt task type). These actions enable you to do things like drive task navigation (skip ahead / back / across / sideways / up / down and generally have fun), open external URLs, add or remove participants to segments and more. This feature applies to single-choice polls only.
Improved Site Administration
Improving the visual and functional experience of Site Admin has been on our to-do list for a while and we think the changes introduced in this release will make things a lot simpler. The existing Site Settings page has been split into two areas:
- "Basic Settings" is now simplified with controls to set defaults for the whole site such language settings and support contact
- "Account Settings" is a new page with controls for user account default settings such as password rules, email notifications and account edit permissions. Both pages have also been given a cleaner design.
The Account Settings page provides new functionality to limit which profile fields participants can edit (i.e. first name, last name, username, email and password), split settings for email notification defaults which distinguishes comments from admins (e.g. probing questions) versus those posted by other participants. All locked fields are hidden but still seen by admins during a Support Login (a padlock with a PowerTip appears to indicate what is locked for participants).
Mobile Improvements
More and more Recollective studies are incorporating mobile into their design. We've spent time this month improving that experience. This release includes:
- Simplified study navigation while completing an activity (navigation and breadcrumb controls are now hidden)
- Automatic scrolling to task instructions when participants are submitting a response
- Improved touch target size for adding photos, videos and files
- Summary tab now shows stream filter icon/links instead of a drop down, even in the smallest layout
Embedded Study Guide
As I'm sure many of you have experienced, our pre-sales, implementation and support teams work hard to make sure that every customer is fully supported and satisfied when using Recollective. That said, we recognize that sometimes you just need a quick aide-memoire or prompt to get started rather than a phone call. That's why we've just implemented a new 10-step help guide embedded into Recollective. It automatically appears on the Summary tab in new studies or can be turned on from Study Settings in the Control Panel for moderators.
The guide shows one step at a time and will take you through the basic process to build, launch and manage a research study using Recollective.
- Analysts can mark each step as done as they proceed and the Guide will advance itself to the next step. When re-logging in, the guide will always displays the last step yet to be completed
- Guides can be hidden when complete or if it is not needed (it can be reinstated via Study Settings)
We've also made a number of other minor changes to the platform, including the ability for admins to control how participants appear to them (e.g. username, full names, id numbers, etc). Finally, despite their desperate pleas to be allowed to take a vacation while temperatures in Canada remain above freezing, we've now got our engineers hard at work on the September release. It's shaping up to be really exciting, with some long-awaited improvements to how moderators can use the Stream....more details next month!
.svg)
