We are trying to think of ways we can make it easier for first-time users to get started with Easy Data Transform.
Currently, we have a Getting Started window that links to an introduction video and the Quick start guide. We also have the ‘balloon help’ that pops up to try and guide you.
We have now added a simple image to the Getting Started window that appears when you first run Easy Data Transform:
We are also thinking about adding some sample .transform files for beginners to open.
Thinking back to the very first time you tried Easy Data Transform:
-did you find it easy to understand the basic concepts?
-what did you get stuck on, if anything?
-did you watch the video or quick start guide?
-what would have helped you in those first few minutes?
It is a long tome ago, but I did something old fashioned (and I‘m older) I downloaded the PDF Manual (by the way, excellent) and read it completely. Not that I got everything in one shot, but I got a good impression of the available functionalities, which I could lookup case by case.
Furthermore I had a look to all available videos in your Youtube channel, at that time not that many ….
Third, after the first time I started to read the forum, to see what others did and downloaded a lot of the discusses solutions to analyse and improve my skills.
Basically, I’m with @Olaf although I watched only one introductory video. I dislike videos on all almost subjects; mostly meandering then glossing over or racing through the bit I wanted to know. I’m in the text, examples, and questions world.
I like your proposed introductory screen, and examples or basic recipes are always good. Perhaps you could draw still more attention to your excellent feature, “How do I?” and add to it a line “Get some help” or “Ask for assistance” with encouragement to try the forum as well as other elements of the Help menu. While that comprehensive Help menu already exists, a further prompt in “How do I?” is basically cost-free.
What is your basis for ordering of the “How do I?” by the way? Is it actual likelihood of being selected? Otherwise may as well make it alphabetical so at least some scan ordering exists.
We do pop-up ‘balloon help’ highlighting and we mention is in several places on the website. But I suspect most users probably still don’t notice it.
Human attention is a finite resource. Drawing attention to one thing, subtracts attentions from other things. Also a ‘shouty’ interface is very distracting. Ideally we need to draw attention to the right things, at the right times. But this is tricky given that people are trying to do very different things and have very different backgrounds. It is a difficult problem.
The order we wrote them, which we saw as a proxy for how important they are and how likely they are to be needed.
Yes, which is why adding “Ask for help” in “How do I?” is a usefully discreet prompt. Make it the last element. If that is shouty, so is the entire menu, which is absurd.
I first went to YouTube page to check out getting started video and it was clear enough, I was facing loads of trouble with lookups in excel and wanted something to quickly join CSV, I was able to do it without much issues
I faced a lot of confusion when filtering , how to look at records which are removed , It was very unintuitive to understand we need to use subtract.
I then misunderstood subtract is the only way , so when DEDUPING , I didn’t for the longest time know about EXPLORE duplicate button.
I didn’t know about command line (or batch processing) was possible since I had never used menu bar , my entire attention was on transformation bar. I didn’t even know two windows of EDT could be open at the same time lol
I’ve read the guide many times honestly on case by case basis for transformation.
I had thought a forum post would have helped and it did cause I got my replies fast within couple of hours.
I faced pretty few problems with the initial start with the program, as I was looking for something exactly like it
I think some demo transforms are a good idea…
What took me several months to see is that yopu do not have to have a file but can also paste data to play with it. I think this is very helpful to play and learn.
Up to now most of my problems lie in selecting the right transform for the job… but the context help is there and it’s pretty good… it does, though, not help you very much to find the name of the transform you might want to read about…
I am open to suggestions on what we could do to make this easier.
It would be nice to have a little AI assistant where you typed in a description of what you want to do and it suggested a sequence of transforms. But I don’t think we have a big enough corpus of text to train an LLM to do that. Also it would be a big distraction from the many other things we want to do with Easy Data Transform.
Could that search box be a little bigger than the other tiles, e.g. double-height? I use it but it could be located more quickly by mouse if there were more click space.
My primary method of entering a transform now is to start typing, which is pretty much limiting to all the transforms I remember. The search box is a useful thing so more prominence / click space would be useful.
Overall use has always been a snap. No complaints at all.
I did find some of the transforms a little outside my experience at first. Fortunately, you can be completely confused by one transform without harming the use of the others. It’s also easy enough to set up a test case and play with a transform.
I do, however, remember my first glimpse of the Internet, back in the Compuserve days. There was WAIS, gopher, Archie, Veronica, IRC, FTP, telnet, UUCP, and other resources modern users never consider.
This is going to sound pretty naive, but at that first glance I thought the Internet was a service like Compuserve, a product with a given set of features and commands. Thirty minutes thoroughly confused me.
I can imagine a new user might approach EDT the same way, thinking it should be one integrated tool instead of a tool kit of many implements. That phase probably passes pretty quickly.
It also occurs to me this evening I’ve been around the block a few times. My first email address had a couple of “!” characters in it, a UUCP bangpath. That must have been after my initial confusion. I configured my own UUCP node on either the first or second release of Slackware Linux.
The biggest blessing of a long contrail is that I have the privilege of working with people half my age. Even more gratifying, they usually manage to keep up pretty well.
