Quirkos is coming...

  About this time last year, I posted an update on Quirkos development for the next year. Even though February continues to be cold and largely snow-drop free in Scotland, why not make it a tradition?!   It’s really amazing how much Quirkos has grown over the last 18 months since our first release. We now have hundreds of users in more than 50 universities across the world. The best part of this is that we now get much more

  To build a well-designed, well-thought-out, and ultimately useful product, today’s technology companies must gain a deep understanding of the working mentality of people who will use that product. For Melody Truckload, a Los Angeles tech company focused on app-based freight logistics, this means intense market research and a focus on training sales agents as researchers.   Kody Kinzie, director of Melody’s special

In Quirkos, the qualitative data you bring into the project is grouped as 'sources'. Each source might be something like an interview transcript, a news article, your own notes and memos, or even journal articles. Since it can be any source of text data, you can have a project that includes a large number of different types of source, which can be useful when putting your research together. This means that you can code things like your research

  Many people have asked how they can integrate notes or memos into their project in Quirkos. At the moment, there isn’t a dedicated memo feature in the current version of Quirkos (v1.0), but this is planned for a free upgrade later in the year. However, there are actually two ways in which users can integrate notes and memos into their project already using methods that give a great deal of flexibility. The first, and most

We are busy at Quirkos HQ putting the finishing touches on the Beta version of Quirkos. The Alpha was relased 5 months ago, and during that time we've collected feedback from people who've used Quirkos in a variety of settings to do all kinds of different research. We've also been adding a lot of features that were requested, and quite a few bonus ones too! We've made search much more powerful, created new graphical reports, and given people

We all know the score: you attend a conference, business event, or training workshop, and at the end of the day you get a little form asking you to evaluate your experience. You can rate the speakers, venue, lunch and parking on a scale from one-to-five, and tick to say whether you would recommend the event to a friend or colleague. But what about the other part of the evaluation: the open comments box? What was your favourite part of the day?

Presenting Quirkos at the CAQDAS 2014 conference this month was the first major public demonstration of Quirkos, and what we are trying to do. It’s fair to say it made quite a splash! But getting to this stage has been part of a long process from an idea that came about many years ago. Like many geeks on the internet, I’d been amazed by the work done by Jeff Han and colleagues at the University of New York on cheap, multi-touch

  Quirkos is intended to be a big step forward for qualitative research. The central idea is to make text analysis so easy, that anyone can do it. That includes people who don't know what qualitative analysis is, or that it could help them to better understand their world. This could be a council or hospital trust wanting to better understand the needs of people that use their services, or a team developing a new product, wanting feedback