This release includes changes to the EPPI-Reviewer Web interface only, it does not come with its own version number as we don't have a separate version numbering system for the Web interface alone. It is nevertheless a relatively major release as we introduce a few new features that aren't available anywhere else.
Being very young, the web interface is evolving rapidly, meaning that we are constantly changing small details such as the specific wording of on-screen instructions, the looks and sometimes location of some functions and more. Documenting each one of these small changes would generate a long list of mostly trivial entries. For this reason, here we are going to concentrate on major changes and will gloss over a number of secondary details.
The most relevant new features are three: this release includes a new "online help" system (intended to complement the existing manual and help resources); a context-aware "feedback" system allowing users to send us comments from within the app; and a new report type, called "Quick Question Report". In terms of transferring existing functionalities from the Silverlight interface, we have added full support for creating/editing arms and started implementing the features available in the "Collaborate" tab.
New Features.
Online help system.
The web interface now contains an internal tracking system that represents what part of the interface is currently shown to the user. This allows the app to "know" what the user is seeing and therefore to select the appropriate help content on request. Whenever the page currently shown is part of this new system, two new buttons will appear on the top-right part of the screen: "Feedback" and "Help".
Clicking on "help" will make the application look for the specific help associated with the current context, and display it in the top-part of the screen, moving the rest of the page contents down. We have written the help content for the most commonly used pages/tabs. Naturally this is work in progress: some pages do not already have their own specific help. When no help is available for a given page/screen, clicking on the "Help" button will return a generic text explaining that new help details will appear as and when ready.
Feedback system.
Since the web interface is entirely new and quite complex (behind the hood), we thought it would be useful to encourage users to communicate with us in a quick and agile manner. Clicking on the "Feedback" button will show a text field that allows users to send us a "within app" feedback message. The system will be aware of the current context (what page/activity is shown on the screen) as well as the current user and review. Thus, this system allows people to send us their thoughts and impression while referring to what they are actually seeing. We plan to extend this system so that it will automatically send us debugging information whenever an error happens within the web-application itself.
Please keep in mind that this system does not include a "reply" feature, meaning that we don't expect that we'll be able to explicitly respond to all feedback messages. We will read and consider them all, but might not be able to address them on a one-by-one basis.
Quick Question Report.
The reporting features of EPPI-Reviewer (Silverlight) are extremely powerful and versatile, which comes with a burden of complexity that affects users and developers in different ways. For this reason, we decided that it was useful to provide a new and flexible system to visualise and export data from within the web interface. We do plan to transfer the existing reporting features, but this will take some time, so this new feature is intended to accommodate frequent needs and to provide a simple reporting system that can be used when maximum flexibility isn't required. The feature is available in the main screen, "References" tab. The "Coding Report" button has a drop-down option called "Quick Question Report". Clicking it opens a panel that allows to select any code that happens to have one or more child codes. Any number of codes can be selected in this way. The resulting report (only considers the "selected" references) will produce a table, with one row per reference. The number of columns will depend on the codes that the user selected; each cell in the table will report which children of a selected code have been assigned to the item in the current row. Options provided in this first implementation are: "Include title?" "Show InfoBox Text?", "Show Coded Text?" and "Show Code IDs?".
The resulting table can be saved as HTML, the format used in this file is readily imported in Excel: users can "Open" the exported file with Excel and the table will imported "as is" (one row per reference).
Ported Features:
this section describes existing features in the Silverlight interface, which are now implemented also in the Web Application.
Full support for (study) Arms.
In the "Item details" page (full user interface: this is not available in "coding only"), the "Study Arms" tab is available. In this tab it is now possible to add, edit and delete the arms associated with the current reference (/study).
Main screen, "Collaborate" tab.
We started implementing the features that are currently available only within the "Collaborate" tab in the Silverlight version. In this release, we could only include the list of review members (read-only) and the list of "Coding Assignments" (Work allocations). This list thus provides access to all coding assignments, and their relative figures (Allocated, Started and Remaining). Additionally, the page also allows to delete current assignments. We plan to add the "create coding assignment" functionalities in the next release.
Enhancement: overview figures.
Before this release, the data shown in "Coding Progress" section on the "Review Home" was retrieved only when opening a review: it would not update as people progressed with their work. Since retrieving this data can take a few seconds (may slow down the app), instead of implementing a system to automatically update these figures we have added a "manual" update button.