This minor release is an anti-verbosity pro-clarity update. I looked around NF for “chartjunk” and annoying distractions and removed as many as I could. This is easiest to do when I haven’t used NF for a while and am able to get some distance from it. When I can look at it with fresh eyes, improvements don’t feel (as much) like picking at my own flesh.

Easier data editing

I finally got rid of the two-mode view-edit display system when you click on a thing (like a question or a story) in a table of similar things. Our original plan was that a two-step system would help people avoid accidentally ruining their data. We thought people should have to view each item, then click “Edit” to change it. But in truth, that extra step is just annoying. As I watched people use the list-of-things widget, I realized that it didn’t really help people protect their data. It just confused them for a while, and then they learned to skip over the view-only step.

So it is gone, man. I removed the “View” and “Edit” buttons. Everything is editable all of the time. Have at it.

Help remembering to give things names

Several items in NarraFirma require short names that identify them:

• questions (eliciting, about stories, about participants, annotation)
• story forms
• story collections
• catalysis reports

Some users have had problems because they created things without giving them short names. This caused problems in linking the things up to other things. NF no longer allows you to do this.

I have also tried to make it more clear that short names are required for some items, in words and in colors.

You can still create a no-name item if you stop editing the short-name field by going to another NF page (for example, by clicking one of the arrow buttons at the top of the page). However, if you stop editing the field by:

• clicking the Close button
• clicking on another item in the list
• clicking one of the arrow navigation buttons under the list

NF will check to see if you set a short name and remind you if you didn’t. That should help. My suggestion is: don’t use the “next page” and “previous page” buttons at the top (or bottom) of the page unless you are done working on that page.

In retrospect, every item in NF should have had UUID linkups rather than short-name linkups. I could change this, carefully, in the future. I just don’t have the time to do it (carefully enough) right now.

I also changed the lists-of-things widget so that it only shows the previous and next arrows if you have 2 or more items in the list, and the start and end arrows if you have 6 or more items in the list. Useless buttons are annoying.

Better story-form editing

When you are creating a story form and rearranging your questions in it, it’s hard (and annoying) to remember what short name goes with what question text. Now it says the question text right there.

Button icons!

Finally, I went through NF and added an icon for every button. Button icons can be cluttery! And annoying! But if they are consistent, they can improve clarity and speed up comprehension, smoothing your workflow. Hopefully these new icons will be of the improving and speeding type, and not the annoying type.

There are a few places where I did not add button icons. These are places where there are several buttons in a set. Adding icons to each of those buttons would take up a lot of screen space. So I left those alone.

Otherwise, every button in NF now has an icon. (Well, except for a few “Close” buttons on pop-up dialogs.)

Little things

I also made some smaller clarity improvements:

• I simplified the header at the top of every page.
• I cleaned up the section pages (Planning, Collection, etc), removing every extraneous word I could find. I shortened the headings and the page-link explanations. Now the section pages should be more quickly skimmable.
• In Planning, I moved the “Assess story sharing” page closer to other pages related to assessment.
• In Collection, I renamed the “Design, generate, or import story forms” page to the simpler “Build story forms.”
• I changed the Help link (at the top of the page) to a Help button so it’s harder to miss.
• I removed the orange backgrounds from the section-page headers so they look calmer and less like buttons.
• I changed the colors of the navigation buttons at the bottoms of the pages. I always felt like they distracted the eye from the content of the page. Now they are more parenthetical.
• I fixed a bug in which activity lists in printed sessions (for story collection and sensemaking) were not in the correct order.

As always, if you find any bugs – or if anything about NF is unclear or annoys you! – please tell me on the GitHub issues page.

This minor release deals more gracefully with a (reported) situation in which a multi-choice question (checkboxes) was changed to a single-choice question (select) after data was collected. NF was choking when the stories were being exported. In general it is best not to make changes to question types after stories have been collected. However, NF should now handle this particular situation more gracefully, by posting warnings to the development console (and exporting the data anyway) rather than refusing to work.

Thank you to the user who pointed this bug. As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.

This minor release fixes a bug in printing story cards where story-form question-answers were not appearing.

Thank you to the user who pointed this bug. As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.

This minor release fixes two tiny bugs you might have run into if you had extra (blank) leading or trailing spaces in your question short names, or if you had extra (empty) lines in your available-answers lists. NF now deals more elegantly with both situations.

Specifically:

1. The choose-questions-for-story-form widget was not matching up questions correctly if your question short names had extra (leading or trailing) blank spaces. This might have caused questions to stay in the pool of unassigned questions (on the right) even after you assigned questions to your story form (on the left). Now any extra blank spaces are being trimmed off, fixing the mismatch.
2. When the survey was displayed, any extra (empty) lines in choice-question available-answers lists were creating malformed survey HTML, causing the error “Something went wrong loading the survey questionnaire from the server.” Blank lines are now being trimmed out correctly. (I meant to trim them out before, but I accidentally used the wrong array function.)

A big thank you to a helpful user who pointed out both bugs. As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.

This minor release fixes two bugs: (a) the texts of edited stories did not appear correctly in the “Show story texts for copying” popup on the “Explore Patterns” page, and (b) annotation import and bulk change might not work correctly for edited stories. Thanks to a helpful user for finding this bug!

If you want a longer explanation, keep reading.

A subtle bug has been creeping into NF (without my noticing it) over the past few years. What happened was, I was supposed to be accessing story data through methods that check for updates to the story. This was to handle situations in which story data were edited (on the “Review incoming stories” page) after they were first entered (via survey, data entry, or import). I did once know about and use these checking-for-updates methods, but I seem to have forgotten about them as the years went by. So I had been poking my fingers directly into the story data, bypassing the checking-for-updates methods. That was a bad thing.

Fortunately, most of the direct access was into things the user cannot change (like story and participant IDs, which are generated by the system). But three direct accesses created problems.

• On the “Explore Patterns” page, showing story texts in a separate window for copying would show the original story texts, not your edited versions. (This is the bug the helpful user found and reported.)
• When you were bulk-changing annotation data, any edited story data would not match up correctly, because only the original versions were being compared.
• When you were importing annotation data, NF was looking for the original story texts in the CSV file, not the edited versions.

These mistakes are all fixed now.

But finding bugs should not be how you remember how you used to do things.

This is just the sort of incident that makes me think software development support systems could do a better job of capturing, managing, and making accessible the stories of software development. Years ago, we told ourselves a story about how we access data that may have been altered, but eventually I forgot the story. The question is, how could I have been helped to remember it?

Probably the best answer is to work the story into the code, which is how we fixed the problem. We made the fields I was poking my fingers into private, so I will get an error if I try to access them directly again. Plus, we strongly typed all references to the data structures involved, so I will see warnings if I try to use them in ways they were not meant to be used again. We should have done all of this long ago, but we didn’t – probably because it didn’t occur to us back then that we would be developing NF in fits and starts with months and years between. I am now thinking that I should probably go over all of the code and clean up any place in which any variable has an undeclared type (of “any”), to better flag future departures from forgotten practices.

As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.

This minor release improves error handling for empty (no-name) questions. NF was choking on them during export. Thanks to a helpful NF user for finding and telling us about this bug!

As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.

This minor release fixes a small bug in which write-in survey answers were being left out of the “this is what you said” copy-and-paste display users can see (if you want them to) after they submit their story(ies). That’s it!

As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.

This “clarity” release improves various usability aspects of NarraFirma.

Most importantly, I added page descriptions to each section page (Planning, Collection, etc). These descriptions used to be in popup “tooltips” that appeared when you hovered over page links. However, it did not seem like people were doing that. So I moved them to texts that always appear after each link. If you find these new explanatory texts annoying, you can turn them off using a new project option in the Project administration / Project options page. I also went through and improved all of the page descriptions, so that they explain more clearly why you would want to use each page.

Other improvements in this release mainly have to do with colors (some of the more annoyingly bright colors have been toned down) and links (which now show hover-over, or focused, boxes to make it more clear what you are about to do). Oh yes, and the section pages now have images that match the home-page diagram, rather than just the boring old name of the section.

I think this will be a more grounded way to look at each section and make the whole experience feel more coherent.

And as usual I found and fixed a few small bugs.

As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.

This minor (but again critical!) release does two things: adds the ability to import annotations from a CSV file, and fixes a bug in which the buttons that add questions to a story form didn’t work when the story form was brand new. It was an oversight in testing and is now fixed.

NF really needs a tester who is not the same person as the developer. Developer testers always miss things.

As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.

This minor (but critical!) release fixes a longstanding bug in the WordPress version of NarraFirma that nobody noticed until today, when a user discovered and posted the issue. On the NarraFirma WordPress options page, if you entered a WordPress user id or role in the “read access” field of a project, and then deleted that id or role, NarraFirma granted anonymous read access to the project. This bug is now fixed.

We never thought to test this use case. More importantly, it never occurred to us that the HTML form on the NF settings page would return a blank string (instead of a null or other non-data result) when the user deleted the contents of a field. Because the user id of an anonymous WordPress user is not “anonymous” (or, again, null) but a blank string, the two fields matched up. Now NF specifically checks for an empty read-access permission string. We apologize for this mistake and hope that it has not affected any other WP-NF installations to date.

Note that this problem has never existed in the Node.js version of NF, in which an anonymous user is called “anonymous” and an empty permission string cannot be stored.

As always, if you find any bugs, please report them on the GitHub issues page.