Feature update: Multiselect, Flow and Coding

Although it has been a few weeks since we published our last feature update, we have still been busy developing new features.

Multiselect

We received a few pieces of feedback from our users that they often wanted to set multiple phrases to have the same font, colour or styling (e.g. highlighting all positive terms). This process used to be quite fiddly with many repeated clicks, not the sort of user experience we are aiming for with Word Cloud Plus. Therefore, we have introduced Multiselect. After enabling the Multiselect mode by clicking the icon below from the toolbar, it is possible to click as many phrases as the user likes before clicking the floating edit button at the bottom of the screen. Then any styling changes will be applied to all the selected phrases in one go.

The new Multiselect mode is available to all users on the free and premium plans.

Flow

This next feature is available to everyone while we do beta testing; once we know it is ready for prime time, it will be a premium-only feature.  By clicking on a phrase within the word cloud, or by clicking "Examine" within the summary table, and then clicking the "Analysis" tab users are able to see the new Flow feature. Flow is designed to provide concise information on the typical words preceding and following the phrase of interest.

Using the above example, we are quickly able to glean that the typical words preceding "data collection" are "except", "requiring", "significant", "involving", "scale" and "hoc" and they are equally frequent. While the following words are "from" and "for", which are also equally frequent.

If we would like to dive in further, we are able to click on any of the preceding words to show us what proportion of the following words correlate. We can also do the same for the following words in reverse. Looking at the example below, after clicking "requiring" we learn that the phrase "data collection" is preceded by "requiring" only once and in that case it was followed by "from". Of course, if we wanted to learn where "requiring data collection from" to our source text, we can always click on the "References" tab.

Coding

The ability to apply codes has been a big ask from our friends in the market research community to make Word Cloud Plus a more powerful insight tool. Just like our Flow feature, this will also be a premium-only feature, but as we are beta testing the feature, we have made it available to everyone.

Adding a Code

Using the "Coding" tab available when viewing a project, we are now able to add new codes to be used.

Appling Codes

After creating the codes we would like to use, we can apply the codes in two different ways. Either by clicking the "Coding" tab when examining a phrase (note this is different to the Coding tab of the project view) or by selecting/highlighting the text using the Text view. Don't worry, if you realise you have forgotten to add a code, you can always add it from their of these two views just before you use it.

Viewing the Results

Yet again, we can view the codes we have applied in two different ways. We can either go back to the "Coding" tab of the project view and click on each code to see how it has been used.

Or if we would like, we can click on the Text tab to see our input text marked up with our codes.

Future work and testing

As mentioned, we are testing a number of features at the moment, this will be our focus for the coming week or two. We thoroughly value all feedback we get from our users, if you find these features useful, buggy or would like to suggest an improvement, please let us know.