Hi all,
Here is a summary of what I have been up to on the reproducibility project in January.
The main focus has been on changes to the UI. The first was the introduction of icons associated to operations. The goal is to give a visual identity to operations so that they can be more easily related in various places of the UI, for now primarily the column menu where they can be triggered and the undo/redo tab where they are listed. The first batch of such icons was added in this PR: Add icons to operations in column menu by wetneb · Pull Request #7060 · OpenRefine/OpenRefine · GitHub. For now, they are only added to the column menu and not to the undo/redo tab.
The motivation to work on icons is also to enable their use in a graphical visualization of the operation history of a project. Developing this feature was my main focus this month. The goal with this feature is to make it easier to understand what has happened in a project or in a list of operations to be re-applied on a project.
So far, it's not really clear to what extent this visualization can really be useful. I have had calls with three team members / users to get their reactions on the prototype and the representation is far from self-explanatory so far (although there were already some noticeable improvements after integrating some of the feedback). I plan to continue iterating on this work and will also make a forum thread about it.
It was really useful to have access to a list of users who use the Extract/Apply feature and have declared an interest in doing testing of early prototypes. That list was compiled by @Martin from the results of the user survey. I plan to reach out to more people on that list to do more user testing. If you want to take part, do let me know.
During the user testing, the feature enabling to adapt column names when applying a list of operations was very well received, with testers confirming its usefulness in their use cases. That's already a nice start. Some bugs were surfaced and I plan to continue working on those in the coming month.