Using Backroom Collaboration in Recollective

A question posed a handful of times in the past few weeks is how to create a backroom comment in Recollective. We’re expanding the backroom commenting capabilities in a future release but for now, this post describes some good practices for backroom comments applied to task responses and excerpts.

A question posed a handful of times in the past few weeks is how to create a backroom comment in Recollective. We’re expanding the backroom commenting capabilities in a future release but for now, this post describes some good practices for backroom comments applied to task responses and excerpts. Task Response Backroom Comment The first and most common backroom comment is tied to a task response. To add them you must first navigate to a task response. To do that, click on an activity card and either select a task card or an participant’s name in the Activity Response Summary table at the bottom of the page:

Clicking on a task card will bring you the first response for that task. Alternatively, clicking on a participant’s name opens their response for the first task in the activity. In each scenario there are two comment textboxes beneath the participant’s task response:

The top box is where you can add either Open Comments (visible to anyone who has permission to view that task response) and Backroom Comments. The bottom box is where you can send a private message (probe) to the participant. To add a backroom comment, select the Backroom Comment option on top of the first comment textbox (you will notice the box turn red), enter your comment and press the Add Comment button. Excerpt Backroom Comment To apply a backroom comment to an excerpt, you must first create the excerpt. This is done by selecting a portion of user submitted text with your mouse and clicking the Save Excerpt option in the menu that appears. The Coded Excerpts section of the side panel will automatically open, enabling you to apply codes to your excerpt and add a backroom comment:

Backroom Comment vs. Backroom Task In both scenarios described above you will notice that underneath the text input fields there is a checkbox labelled "Make this a backroom task" that, by default, is enabled. Keeping this enabled will turn your backroom comment into a “to do” item. This means the person creating the task is either asking someone else to do something (eg. “Please probe more on this response”) or are setting a reminder for themselves to do something. If you don’t want to create a backroom task and are merely commenting (e.g. “This is a trend we’re beginning to see more often”), uncheck that box to avoid creating a task. Backroom Comment Notifications All backroom comments and tasks are easily accessible in the Backroom section of the side panel:

This list shows, in reverse chronological order, all backroom comments made within the study. You can use the options at the top to filter that full list to show outstanding or previously completed tasks. You can click on a item in the list to be brought to the original task response or excerpt that the backroom comment was made against. For tasks, once they are complete, click the "Mark as Completed" link to move the task from your To Do list to your Completed list. This helps you keep on top of any outstanding tasks to do within the study. Do you have any suggestions for improvements to backroom comments? Please add your suggestions by commenting on this blog or submitting a feature request directly from your Recollective study (click the Feature Request option in the side panel).

Lyndsay Lewis
Implementation Consultant

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