December Recollective Release - Interactive Word Clouds!

Christmas has come early to Recollective. Launched late on Friday 13th Dec, we've rolled out a huge release which introduces interactive word clouds, full text keyword searching and a brand new rich text editor.

Christmas has come early to Recollective. Launched late on Friday 13th Dec, we've rolled out a huge release which introduces interactive word clouds, full text keyword searching and a brand new rich text editor.

Interactive Word Clouds

In the late September release we introduced the concept of summary views for the stream so you could see a photo and video wall or a dashboard of activity charts in addition to the standard newsfeed of responses and discussions. Interactive word clouds complete the set by representing text-based responses and discussions in a summarized, highly visual format. I have to say, they're pretty special.

Study Summary - What Drives You?

Not only does each word cloud provide a visually stunning representation of popular words used by participants anywhere in Recollective, but it acts as a way to explore and analyze that content. Click on any word in the cloud to conduct a search and view all matched responses directly beneath the cloud. Drill down through words to go deeper into the content. You can even filter the cloud based on Activity, Task, Segment or People.

Study Summary - What Drives You?-1

Interactive word clouds can be accessed from the Summary tab, or from the Response view of any activity. Here's the full rundown on the interactive word cloud feature:

  • Filter the same way as all other overviews (e.g. filter down to task and topic level and/or by person or segment)
  • Clouds appear on profile pages for a single-person summary
  • Words can be selected to conduct search (results appear below cloud) and the cloud refines to show related words (which can be repeated)
  • Hover on any word to view the number of instances of that word
  • The word cloud is responsive to available width (less words appear in smaller sizes at more narrow widths) so it displays beautifully on tablet devices and smartphones
  • Includes all participant-submitted text in activities and discussions

Rather than being a simple dump of text data, the Recollective interactive word cloud respects the privacy of content too so it can be visible to participants, giving them even more engaging features to stimulate participant in and enthusiasm for your study.

  • Excludes masked and fully-private activities and topics when viewed by participants
  • Excludes private messages but does include private comments from participants to admins
  • Excludes everything posted by administrators

Here's an example from a built-out study to illustrate just how rich the word cloud can be:

Interactive Word Cloud

Full-Text Keyword Search

We now index all text responses, discussions and comments to deliver a fabulous full-text keyword search. Just type in any word(s) in the search field at the top of your control panel (or at the top of any existing word cloud) and Recollective will not only provide a list of matching content, but it will build the results into a custom word cloud for you.

Study Summary - What Drives You?-2
  • Supports multiple keywords (words can be typed and/or selected from a cloud)
  • Smart matching ensures that content is matched on multiple keywords only where they're present in the same paragraph (not just same response)
  • Paragraphs returned in results are automatically split into sentences for easy excerpting (single-click!)
  • New "Search Study" option in context menu shown during excerpting, appears below "Save Excerpt"
  • Results include photos with captions, videos with additional commentary and image review thumbnails with annotations
  • Images can be enlarged and videos can be played directly from a search result

New rich-text editor with auto-save

Imagine typing in the perfect question that's formatted and written so beautifully you want to cry. Then your computer freezes and when you can finally refresh the page, it's all gone. That nightmare scenario is a thing of the past for Recollective admins. We're really excited to release a new rich-text editor with built-in auto-save functionality. Not only does it auto-save, but it's fully HTML5 compliant. That means it's faster, supports drag-and-drop embedding of media files into your text and you can even paste in a YouTube or Vimeo URL and it will auto-convert into a fully embedded and playable video.

Task Setup - What Drives You?-1

Here's some more details about this great new tool:

  • Currently added to admin-facing areas: Email Broadcast, Email Invitation, Task Description and Study Overview. We'll be adding it into the remaining participant-facing areas in a subsequent release
  • If your connection drops or session is lost, you're warned to save the content (it gives you link to login again). Then, once a connection or session is restored, it continues auto-saving
  • Supports drag and drop upload of images
  • You can now paste any YouTube or Vimeo URL in the editor and press ENTER and it will auto convert to a fully embedded and playable video
  • Table editing is much simpler and better looking
  • The editor is fully HTML 5 compliant which for IE 9 and up and all modern browsers means it's much faster
  • Supported in iOS and Android devices including embedding images
  • Participants using IE 7 and 8 also get a new editor but there are some limitations. Upgrade for the best experience!
  • The rich-text editor input area grows in height automatically (eliminating clumsy double scroll bars)
  • The toolbar automatically snaps to the top so controls remain in view at all times or use the new full-screen mode for easy editing without distractions
  • The view-source mode cleans up any code that's pasted in to keep this neat and easy to read

We have some great new roadmap features planned for the early part of 2014 which further extend how Recollective can be used to disrupt the MR space. Intrigued? We think you'll be delighted when we finally reveal them! Stay tuned for more information next month. As ever, if you have suggestions for how we can improve or extend Recollective, give us a call or drop me an email. We love getting your feedback and every bit of it is taken into consideration as we prioritize and build out new functionality.

Steve Thompson
COO

Let's research happy together