The app can be used for qualitative studies or quantitative data collections such as in-person surveys and is designed both for in-person and phone interviews. TagPad is an iPad app designed for researchers conducting interview studies. The intention with this paper is to introduce TagPad and provide a summery of the information gained from examining 12 ongoing studies. When designing and evaluating a research tool it’s also about looking into how the tool positively can change existing procedures, deciding on good practices for using the tool, and not least looking into the limitations of the tool. The knowledge will also be useful for further studies of TagPad including setting up field trials and to better understand the feedback gained during these trials. Not only is this knowledge useful when designing features and interface. Therefore domain knowledge is part of the development process.
It’s both difficult to decide when a trial can be labeled as a success and to get a broader understanding of the system and the diversity of the users. Running trials only to determine if an application can be considered a success or not is neither that useful or interesting. By examining ongoing studies we investigated how data collections are carried out and in this paper we present the results. Other research has shown that when developing tools for researchers the settings and requirements need to be understood. Such knowledge can help determining how collecting data can be made more effective and reliable. The data collection phase is an area that still needs more investigation. We also wanted to better understand the data collection phase in interview studies and the context in which studies are being conducted. Not only are we interested in developing a usefulness tool. It should not be: “the tail wagging the dog.”. As Barbour points out qualitative research should not be reduced to a list of technical procedures.
The idea is to provide a tool that can support research and automat some processes while still offering the researcher flexibility and creativity so it’s not the tool dictating the data collection. It’s intended to support the data collection phase and also offers the possibility to add tags to the interviews for pre-analysis. We here present and provide and overview of TagPad – an iPad app designed for conducting interview studies. We present the results and briefly discuss how TagPad can optimize and support these processes. To get a better understanding of how interview studies are conducted, particularly the data collection phase, we looked into 12 ongoing studies and found that the data collection often is associated with unorganized and complicated processes.
The data can be uploaded to a cloud-based data repository making it simple to access and share data. TagPad can record audio and save text entries and multiple-choice answers. It's been designed to fit flexibly with structured and semi-structured interviews for both small and large-scale studies. The app is designed to support interview studies. this paper we present the iPad app TagPad.