On Mon, Feb 1, 2010 at 10:57 PM, Ross Perkins <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Any claim of "intuitiveness" is highly subjective .. If one has previously
> used NVivo (say, v. 7), then its interface is more "intutive" than
> Transana's or any other. Personally, I find Atlas.ti's UI to be convoluted,
> but I am sure it is simply because I have not spent enough time with it.
This is disingenuous. If Atlas.ti's UI wasn't convoluted, you wouldn't
need to spend "enough time" with it. "intuitiveness" is, I believe,
simply a measure of how easily a computer-literate user can find his
way around a program for the first time without needing the user
manual. It's a measure, firstly, of how well the programmers have
adhered to the de facto standards that have been developed for ease of
use and, secondly, whether the program is laid out in such a way that
the most commonly-used program-specific functions are presented to the
user along short, logical and readily apparent paths. Microsoft's
standards, for example, for making programs easy and "intuitive" to
use, are irritatingly prescriptive but the result is uniformity and
ease of use.
Transana meets these criteria; neither NVivo or Atlas.ti do.
My own introduction to statistics, for example, was via Statistica 4.
I'd never used a statistics program before, but I was able to install
the program, enter data and carry out simple statistical calculations
without needing the user manual. The very limited help I needed was
available by pressing F1 and reading the well-laid-out help files.
There can be few people who could say the same about NVivo or
Atlas.ti. I certainly couldn't.
Your comment about "get[ting] used to the [NVivo] terminology" is
revealing. If the program was 'intuitive", you wouldn't need to get
used to the terminology, because the terminology would already be
familiar, either from experience with other (non-QDA) software or
because it conforms to standard QDA usage.
Mike
Michael Mellody
Ecclesia Knowledge Management
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