Suggestions for Fieldtrip from the ERP visualisation study

[vladdez]

In early 2023, we conducted a user experience study on ERP visualization tools. The main focus was on understanding how practitioners use ERP visualizations, but we also collected tool-specific feedback.
For each plot type in our study, we asked users to provide challenges and potential improvements for the toolbox they last used. The raw responses for your toolbox and general feedback for ERP visualization are attached in the following CSV files.
We further provide user preferences, and some discussion and recommendations on ERP plotting in our preprint [1], which might be of interest as well. We are very open to comments and critiques, please use any of the following contacts to reach out.

Note that in some cases the first column includes other tool names too, because people had the same issue with multiple tools.
vladimir.mikheev@vis.uni-stuttgart.de
benedikt.ehinger@vis.uni-stuttgart.de
[1] doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.12.20.572507

fieldtrip.csv
general_feedback.csv

[schoffelen]

Thanks for sharing this @vladdez. How do you suggest we proceed from here? I think that many wishes from users are valid ones from the user perspective, but currently the core developers' team is small. We have always stressed the possibility that people can suggest code improvements, in this case pertaining to functionality that improves the plotting experience. Collecting a wish list is nice, but we cannot accommodate (all of) those wishes because there is not much incentive for us to implement them. I have the feeling that many people these days just take the open source toolboxes for granted, and/or underestimate the work that goes into maintaining them, and do not realize that most core dev people are active scientists, and not software developers.

However, in order to use this feedback constructively, I could think of documenting this list on the website, and then invite people (ideally those who gave the original comment) to add information about how they combine the (in their eyes) limited fieldtrip functionality with their own code voodoo, to achieve what they want to see in a figure. This helps the community in general, because people can learn from each other's solutions, and if common denominators emerge, it may inspire the more adventurous people to move some of that functionality into the core fieldtrip plotting functions.

I am curious about your and @behinger 's ideas.

[behinger]

hey Jan-Mathijs,
indeed, our idea was definitely not to "tell" you to implement all of these! For us the motivation was rather opportunity. Generally users are not that forthcoming with feedback in my experience. We had a unique opportunity to discuss these issues with lot's of users and we repurposed some questions.

I think the "wishlist" could be a good way to document it. As a non-core developer to fieldtrip, it would be great to make clear in what ways breaking changes are allowed for plotting tools, just to set some expectations.

Cheers, Bene