New signals interface launched!
OfflineSo we've rolled out the first of our new features, a completely revamped signals entry interface that we think will help get signals in their most useful forms, as well as provide better help and guidance to signal creators. We invite your feedback on this, and of course please keep in mind that this is a work in progress, new features always have kinks that need working out. Finally, another caveat is that the layout and visual theme is still being redone - we'll get it functional first, then make it pretty and polished.
With that in mind, here's whats NEW!
Signal Templates
We've added templates (such as research, technologies, wildcards), that you pick while creating a signal. Picking a template pre-populates the body of the signal with questions that guide you in the process of creating a high-quality signal. Of course, these questions are only a guideline - which is why we keep them inline instead of making a long, complicated form to fill out.
Signal Abstracts
One of the problems with the earlier signal formats was that user's werent' easily able to browse through lots of signals and pick out the ones that might inform a forecast they were developing. Along with encouraging shorter, more structured signals, we've borrowed abstracts or teasers from the blogging world. As you signal, think about the 2- or 3- sentence description that most accurately captures the essence of your signal; this is going to show up on the explore pages and home pages. The abstract auto-updates with the first paragraph of your signal, so you don't have to do a great deal of work to simply *have* an abstract, but it would be much better (until we get some fancy AI) if you hand-edited your abstract to make it more representative of what you think should show up in your teaser. We hope having tons of abstracts at your fingertips will speed up the process of going through signals and identifying relevant ones.
Note - while we have only pushed out the redesigned signals right now, we've made some changes on the explore and home pages to take full advantage of things like abstracts. Again, this is a work in progress.
Note 2 - you can always hit "Update Abstract" to bypass the autoupdate and fill out the abstract box with your first paragraph.
Editing feedback
The new interface lets you keep track of your word count, as well as gives you gentle reminders when you've been too verbose. Our research at IFTF has shown that shorter signals are often harder-hitting; they are provocative while not making too great a demand on the user's time to read through pages and pages. You are encouraged to use links, blockquotes, sources, whatever you need to flesh out and evidence your signal; just make sure that the signal body is written out in a way that makes your point clear, and makes the importance of the signal clear, in few short paragraphs. Following the templates and guidelines is a good way to get used to this. Signaling is kind of like a very specialized kind of blogging or micro-reporting, and we wan to make sure you get all the help you might need.
Improved Editor
We've moved to the FCK editor, a plugin which makes it easier to format your signals the way you want them, to insert picture (which now show up inline!), to copy and paste text from word processors without messing up formatting, etc.
NOTE that FCK has some issues on safari 2.0, a known problem we are working around currently. Things work perfectly on safari 3.0 and up.
Popover help and guidelines
Confused by the new interface? Nearly every element of the edit screen has a "guidelines" or "help" link in the right column. Clicking on that will bring up help related to the field next to it. Go ahead and try it!
Save draft functionality
If you're like me, you're not a big fan of fooling around with drupals publish / unpublish system in order to keep working on a signal across multiple logins and logouts. And yet -- you often want to edit and polish a signal and take your time with it before you send it out to the world. Save draft works exactly like most email clients - lets you compose a signal, save a draft, and then return to it later to edit or publish it. Hit "view drafts" on your signal creation screen to get to a list of the drafts you've saved.
===A few final words
Wait! what about my old signals, that didn't have templates and abstracts?
Edit them so that they do! Here's how - go into edit mode, copy the body of your signal, switch to a template you like, and paste your body back in. Then hit "update abstract", and you're good to go! We will have automated scripts + the IFTF editorial team doing this for the older signals as we go along, so expect to see some new stuff tacked onto your signals. Of course, we don't want to be stepping on anyone's toes, so you're always free to edit the abstract or template type that has been assigned to your signal by default.
Why roll out features one by one, rather than redesigning everything and flipping the switch?
Because we are already out in public, with a small but valuable community of users. Doing updates incrementally allows us to assess people's reactions to the system and make tweaks and fine tune stuff that wouldnt be possible if we changed everything at once - users would be overwhelmed.
Something is broken / doesnt work on my browser / used to work before
Go ahead and report it! Put it on the buglist, or reply to this forum post.
What's next?
Some excititing things with groups, sets, and pools, coming up next week!
Comments
Signals
Now whenever I cut and paste from Word into a signal I cannot get rid of all the formatting information. Would you please fix this?
thanks philip
.. for your comments. Here are some responses :
regarding cutting and pasting from word, the ability to retain all the formatting information is precisely why some users would use Word as the source. When you say you want to get rid of formatting information, does that mean a non-rich text editor, or do you want to take formatted text from a word processor, have it "unformat" when you paste into the signals edit box, and manually re-format it in the editor?
- additional terminology: as I've tried to explain in previous posts, we are doing this one piece at a time. Such a process with a live site and existing users is naturally complex. We have added terms to the signals process because we saw that many users, especially new ones, were having difficulty understanding what kinds of content qualified as signals, and how they differed from short articles in general.
-abstraction and feedback - do you think that abstracts in themselves are not useful, or that abstracts as currently implemented are hard to work with (automatic abstraction etc)? Regarding feedback, would you like to make suggestions about what kinds of feedback would be more useful, or do you feel that the feedback in general is not useful? One of the big, big problems for forecasters, as well as casual users, was that signals were too long and there was no quick way to browse through large numbers of them. Having a form of abstracted content is one way to move towards a solution; perhaps it is not the best, but that's exactly what this forum is here for.
Regarding changes to groups, visual design, and explore / home page layouts, all of that is in progress in the context of the larger redesign process of the site. Again, we felt that it was important to do this incrementally, and in the top post of this thread I've laid out some of the rationale for that. We agree completely that the layout is complex and it can be visually simplified; we are in the thick of doing that, but we do want to roll out features as they are complete, to get precisely the kind of feedback that this thread is eliciting.
Again, thank you for your valuable suggestions, and please look for them to be incorporated in various changes as we move forward.
Jargon
You entirely missed my point about jargon. The problem is not with existing users and contributors but with the wider public. You are going to need a glossary for first-time visitors to even navigate the site. That is assuming they are not turned off entirely and decide not to return. Gradually introducing new terms like "wildcard" to the already existing list of jargon like "signal, research, place, and hypothesis" does not solve anything. For example, the new signal templates (wildcard, place, research, technology) are listed in boldface under the contributor. This simply adds more clutter rather than clarity for the general audience. What exactly is the clear line distinguishing "research" from "technology?" The labelling currently seems somewhat arbitrary. What wrong with using plain English?
Let me clarify
What I mean by introducing terms incrementally is not that adding jargon slowly will improve things for the users as opposed to adding jargon all at once. What I mean is that as we change / upgrade features, some changes will add terminology and some changes will reduce it. For instance, while we have introduced some new terms within signals, we are planning to do away with hypotheses entirely, since they are underused and hard to distinguish from forecasts. I merely request that any new features be evaluated as standalone pieces first and as parts of the site second, since the site is going to change significantly around them. I guarantee that the overall site experience will be simpler and more jargon-free than what we started out with.
Regarding distinguishing research from technology, here is the labeling currently used, which is displayed as subtitles on the signals entry page
Research: A potentially significant shift in your research area (a discovery, social trend, controversy...)
1. What is the development? Summarize it briefly, or if it's described in an article or online source, share a quotation that describes its essentials.
2. What's novel about it? Why did this catch your attention?
3. What impact could it have? How it might it affect how scientists think or work?
Technologies: A new technology, method or tool that could be important in science and technology
1. What is the technology? How is it used?
2. What fields might this technology change? It might make an important piece of work easier or cheaper; make a type of experiment more powerful; or make it more accessible to a wider variety of scientists and non-scientists.
3. How will the technology change the way we do science?
Thus, to our minds, the distinction between research and technologies is one of scope. The technologies section focuses more on methodology and tools; the research section focuses more on broader issues within a field of research. The distinction, for example would be between the development of a new kind of gene sequencing algorithm vs. the discovery of a gene for, say, obesity.
Feedback on signal template labels
If you are determined to keep the new signal labels, that is frankly up to you. As a regular contributor who wants to see the site improved, I am merely trying to give you feedback. I do not believe the bureaucratic exercise of dividing signals up as “research, technology, and wildcard (why not science too?)” has much more utility that the more specific key words already provide. You do see that many signals can be categorized as both research and technology, no? Currently the template categories are too vague and too few to have significant meaning. Even if you added a dozen more template categories like “wildcard” (how about “humdinger”?), what good would it do? Does it help much with searching? Not really. You are still going to have to define what these additional terms mean and you certainly haven’t convinced me that forcing the audience to learn the new jargon has enough of a payoff.
Hypotheses
Actually, I am starting to like the hypothesis category. There are a number of questions I would like to toss up for discussion and feedback without necessarily writing and researching a full forecast. Often, the questions are in areas that I do not have sufficient knowledge and would like to collaborate with others to solve.
Comments on New Interface
I just used the new interface for posting signals and had the following observations/comments.
1) Templates:
Is the desire that signals must use the bullet point format suggested in the new template? If so, this will make writing the signals quicker, but destroy much of the narrative.
If the template is just suggested and not mandated, then I would like to see an option to turn it off for the more advanced user. In other words, if I haven't ever written a signal this is useful, but if I have it is unnecessary. Forcing me to delete the default template each time is cumbersome.
2) Cut/Paste
Cut and paste doesn't appear to work directly. Instead, I am told that due to browser security I must paste it into another box first. Again, this double pasting process (try to paste, then paste into another box, to have pasted by system back into signal box) is cumbersome.
3) Sources
I could not find an area to enter sources (used to be a field) and just included them in my post. Given the importance of validating our impressions, news, etc. I would think we would want to keep this separate?
4) Images
In my post with the most recent interface I tried to insert two images. The new image handeling system didn't appear to allow me to do this unless the image was on the server, but I couldn't find a way to upload the image to the server for this placement. As such I ended up appending the images to the document but since there are no thumbnails of them I don't think they will get viewed.
5) Spelling
It would be great if the new rich editor had a spell check feature. Without it, the possibility of misspelling due to mistypign is pretty high for me :) which decreases reabilitiy.
Sincerely,
Jerry
thanks jerry
thanks for your feedback. here are some responses
1. templates - bullet points are definitely not the intention. we'll reformat the default text to make that clear. the idea is to provide guidelines for effective signaling. It's one of our core beliefs as futurists that certain established ways of writing a signal yield better results, both in terms of provoking systematic thought about the future, as well as leading to better forecasts. Turning templates off, or having a blank default, is definitely something we'll consider.
2. Cut / paste - this hasn't shown up in our testing. It's possible that an unusually high level of browser security, or a combination of browser and OS is causing this. Can you please post something the bugs thread about this?
3. Sources - you should be able to add them under the add audience / source pane. We chose to hide this under the more advanced options to not overwhelm the new user with options.
4. Images - was this issues with images in general, or just when you tried to work with multiple images? If the latter, we'll investigate. Again, a post with the exact circumstances and what you were trying to do , in the bugs section would be very helpful.
5. spell checker - great idea, we'll put this in. or have inline, check-as-you type.
spell checker added
just an update - a spell checker is now available in the rich text editor; it uses the unix aspell library.
Templates: An option to
Templates: An option to turn off the default template perhaps in user profile would be welcome. Otherwise, your first step is to delete the template.
Cut/Paste: The cut/paste problem is being experienced by me in Firefox and Safari on my Mac.
Sources: Found that they were hidden and this works as before, no problem.
Images: Could not directly add a single image, unless it was already on the server. How do I add new images to the server?
Spell Checker: Great and thanks!
Spam from X2?
I'm getting messages today at my email address w/ this subject line: Science in the United States: 'hypothe_signal.jpg' at X2
from: Justin apang@iftf.org
<p>Share 'hypothe_signal.jpg' by Justin Read more: http://iftf.appnovation.com/en/node/54348 Post reply: http://iftf.appnovation.com/en/comment/reply/54348#comment-form -- You are subscribed to the group 'Science in the United States' at X2. To manage your subscription, visit http://iftf.appnovation.com/en/og/manage/17462</p>
Looks like spam to me!