What a success!

3 min to read

Our Workshop in June attracted so much attention

The ReKisstory project is all about users, especially users with limited technical experience. Why? Because the cutting-edge technology we use is too hard for many ordinary users on the web. We talk about valorization in this blog, but to have impact in the society, it is important the technology is easy to understood and use. This is why we organized 5 online focus group workshops to test the tool and get feedback for improvement. We targeted cultural heritage experts to evaluate the functionalities of temporal data.

Invitation to the workshop was sent to a mailing list and alike. We received more than 50 registrations within a matter of 2-3 days. Sadly we needed to invite only 20+ people due to the technical limitation of the workshop setup. 16 people showed up and we had a good session.

Hard time too

Admittedly, it was not easy to organise online session alone. I prepared:

1 privacy content form (EU data protection: GDPR)
2 online questionnaires
2 detailed visual manuals
1 query examples document
1 workshp slides

That's hells a lot. In addition, what is not easy to do is an online workshop with 5 people. I needed to do technical support and Q&A during the workshop without help. There was a hands-on testing session in which the workshop participants can try out ReKisstory. Trust me it is hard, especially because I have no idea what people are doing and lookin at. Most people just shout without telling me any details of the problem. It's often not possible to reproduce the problem on the spot. What I get is a bit of facial reactions and voices. A shared document and chat helps a little, but that's not enough. I started to regret to do this project ;-)

Moreover, there was a bit of panic during the session. Some people started to report that auto-suggest is not working. It is a critical function to test the tool! Of course, I did some testing in advance (even with some colleagues). The problem is the error happened rather randomly. I did not understand why it works for some people but does not for others. I was crying to tell them that hopefully it will work after the workshop, but without knowing if it really will be. After quite some investigation also with my colleagues, I found the reason. It was about browser language variations. The problem happend when the users' language setting is refined with a country, like Belgian Dutch, Canadian English, and Austrian German. If there are normally no variations (Japanese, Hungarian etc), there was no problem. It was difficult to detect, because the external technology I use provides empty response and does not show errors. Programming could be full of mysteries sometimes...

Strong feedback and support from the participants

Despite those challenges, I can tell we got positive feedback in general. My effort was paid off. The details of our workshops will be revealed in a coming up peer-review academic paper. If it is accepted, we will keep you posted in the blog about the outcome of these workshops. For now, thank you so much for those who have participated and contributed to our research!

"Success is neither magical nor mysterious. Success is the natural consequence of consistently applying the basic fundamentals."

Jim Rohn

Source: Wikipedia