I've been thinking ... which some of you know is a dangerous thing ... about Logos/Verbum usability

Faithlife will never get beyond complaints that Logos/Verbum is too hard to use until they develop the ability to read the users' minds. But that is not to say they shouldn't continue to listen to their users and look for ways to integrate the tools and resources in ways that seminarians learn in class and/or from their classmates.

Workflows are one means of integration, that works for a limited number of tasks - limited because it doesn't handle:

non-Biblical text e.g. to study a creed or statement of faith
multiple passages e.g. parallel passages or the assigned readings for a liturgical date
art images e.g. visio divina, visual midrash
invoking collections e.g. divide commentaries by date or type

One could continue but that list is sufficient to show why much of the Bible study of the "pew-warmer" (my nickname for those non-professionals who aren't in the sanctuary ... more often called "the assembly" or "the congregation") is outside the workflow capabilities. I support many of these requests:

But often, what a user wants to do is not a full workflow but simply wanting to do a single step e.g. identify major textual variants, examine all cross-references, identify Church Fathers who commented on the text, see what the text supports in doctrinal documents . . . In many of these cases, FL has identified the student need and produced a resource/tool that assists the student. However, there is a missing link -- the teacher's directing the student to the right resources for the task at hand.

I would like to suggest that Faithlife provide a wide array of layouts designed to (a) research a single issue (b) illustrate the relationships between resources and (c) illustrate the relationship between guide sections/Factbook sections and the issue at hand. These would prefer package resources to individual sources when practical; some would require a technical and a non-technical version of the layout; some layouts would be "duplicated" based on different languages and/or base texts.

The example that sent me off in this direction:

These many layouts would be modifiable with the ability to reset to the default. Potential topics:

textual variants for passage
Near Eastern literature related to passage
Talmudic laws related to the passage
Near Eastern customs related to the passage topic
grammatical ambiguity in the passage
variation in pericope boundaries and their effect on the interpretation of the passage
typology that has been applied to the passage images
Jewish vs. Christian understanding of the passage
identification of people spoken of symbolically (primarily to prophecy)
analysis of chiasms, parallelism, set forms . . .
geographic locations and the folklore regarding those locations (connotation)
where is the passage used in the service book outside of the lectionary readings?
where is the passage used in the lectionary readings/prayer book readings? what does that apply about it's interpretation?
various ways a person (or place) is referred to and how that helps build an image of their character
everywhere that an event is referred to in the Bible and what that tells us about their understanding of the event
ditto but for apocryphal/pseudepigrapha literature
ditto but for rabbinic literature
ditto but for Church father's writings

My list of possibilities is basically a quick brain dump. I would be very interested in what layouts you think would help you learn to integrate your resources and tools. When I think it is concrete enough to do so, I will put a formal request on Feedbear ... or not if others think it is a lame approach.

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Comments

Mal Walker

Thanks for sharing MJ, I think it’s a good idea and would support a request on Feedbear. Let me bounce my initial response off you, as someone who has only recently acquired Logos and being to integrate it into my seminary studies.

First, Logos is hard. I’ve been investing a lot of time into learning how to use it, spending hours on the help centre, forums, zoom sessions etc, and I’m still barely scratching the surface. It has a steep learning curve, and sadly I suspect that many users (such as my fellow classmates) won’t get beyond using it as an expensive interlinear bible, with the occasional BDAG search thrown in. This is a shame, and I support the desire to better onboard users.

Second, I think your idea of using simple layouts to address single issues is a good way to go. A major turn off for me with the guides and factbooks etc is that most of the time it’s too much information, which is overwhelming, and it’s too complex, when I’m only trying to do a single thing. A bank of layouts for common single step tasks similar to the quick start layout could be very helpful for the new user who simply doesn’t know yet what they can do.

I agree it would need to be modifiable with the ability to reset to default. Specifically, one would need to be able to easily modify what resources the layout uses. This is for two reasons. One, people often need to conform to their academic/church/denominational requirements. In the example you gave MJ, I personally would need to modify it to use the UBS5 which is what my seminary uses.

Two, I simply don’t know or trust many of the resources provided when I purchased logos. This is one of the reasons I don’t use many of the tools or guides yet, because I simply have no idea where they are pulling their info from. At the end of the day, many of us are using logos to teach and share the Gospel – What we use in that endeavor while shape and change both myself and those I am teaching. I am going to be very selective with resources because of that. Allow people to modify these layouts, especially so that new users can select resources they trust will be a must. And yes, I know we can prioritise resources; that has its own issues and needs an overhaul, but for new users I think this would still be better.

Incidentally, this is where your idea of using package resources would be potentially quite helpful, especially if said packages reflect current academic standards and not simply what is out of copyright.

Hmmm, the more I think about the idea the more I am liking it. Some layout topics that you mentioned that I would be keen for are:

Textual variants for passage.
Grammatical ambiguity in the passage.
Variation in pericope boundaries and their effects.
Use of passage in lectionary, prayer book etc.

Others include

Use of passage in Early Church Fathers
Use of passage in creeds and confessions.

Thanks again for sharing your thoughts. Sorry for the essay in response! I’m keen to see what others have to say as well.

Justin Gatlin

The huge list of partially completed workflows in my Guide section proves your point. I open them for some structure on some specific step or another, and then move on. My only concern is that the guide section is already overwhelming. There are so many workflows and guide fragments that it is hard to figure out where to start (do I really need 10 different workflows for preparing a sermon installed by default?). Giving me twenty more things does not feel like an upgrade. A better solution, in my opinion, is to finally get the ability to share layouts or create projects. Ideally, you could embed layouts in a workflow, so even if the workflow is a single step, you could give some instructions for context. Then let me download the ones I am interested in, and then delete them when I am through.
Long term, the only real solution is for the semantic processing technology to advance enough for the abandoned Faithlife Assistant to actually be useful. The blurbs within search are a nice move in that direction, but users expect to type "church fathers discussing Genesis 1" and get what we would recognize as a guide section, not a search.

Thanks MJ for your thoughts. Let me share my thoughts, as a user since Logos 2, first as a layperson and now as a pastor.

First, I have to admit I'm an old dog that doesn't easily pick up new tricks. So even though I've upgraded my Logos with every new version, I have yet to try out the new Notes, Sermon Builder, Layouts, Workflows and some such new-er features. I tend to embrace the newer Guides more readily.

Regarding Layouts, I have one standard layout that I use everyday, and I open and close books as needed. I just don't like the thought of having Logos close everything I have open (that I'm locationally used to) and let it open books and resources suggested or recommended by others (i.e. Logos). So yes, I'm a bit stubborn.

From my perspective, I think over the years Logos has added enough features and guides to probably convince newer users (thinking more about seminarians, not laypersons) that Logos is conquerable and manageable, once you put in some hours and work to figure out the overall lay of the land.

I personally think that the "final frontier" that Logos needs to conquer and overcome is the usability of Search (which happens to be the core of any Bible software). I think L10 came a long way by taking the first step of "simplifying" the search syntax. But as Mark and others acknowledged, that's merely a first step. There's still a long way to go to make the search parameters truly understandable and discoverable by average and entry-level users. I hope that FL/Mark will continue to do focus groups and surveys and continue to focus on making Search accessible and understandable for L11.

Which brings me (almost) to MJ's proposal. I think with the buildup of Factbook (knowing that some users dislike it for various reasons), there's now pretty much a single entry point for topical or thematic research. If I think of any topic or theme, I just open Factbook and there's almost always some matches to choose from as a starting point of my research. I'm happy with that.

But there's currently no such simple single point of entry for scripture-based research. The Passage Guide is a comprehensive, overwhelming dump of everything under the sun that Logos knows about a given Scripture passage. So to build on MJ's proposal, I'd like to suggest:

A new Passage FAQ tool, either as a separate new tool, or as an add-in top section added to the Passage Guide (like those recommended "cards" presented in the new All Search results).
The Passage FAQ tool can be linked to an active Bible window.
This tool will present a list of potential questions that someone researching a given Bible passage might ask, including the ones listed by MJ above, and some more "basic" Bible-study type questions more suited for lay leaders, such as "Where is Bethlehem?" "Who is Joseph?" etc., or even specific problematic or controversial aspects of a given passage.
The list will also include common searches with search queries pre-built for the user, bypassing the need to learn the underlying search parameters structure.
The list of FAQs will be long, so they will need to be categorized, and/or sortable by popularity or some other criteria.
It would be even better if Logos can track my frequency of use and gradually sort my most frequent categories first (e.g. if I never ask textual variant or other questions like the type MJ is interested in, but I almost always click on "basic" Bible-study type questions, then those will get sorted first over time).
Each of these FAQs will either open a relevant tool (e.g. Factbook, Atlas, one of the guides, specific pre-formatted Search, etc) and/or offer to open a new Layout as suggested by MJ above.

I understand that the Factbook already contains a brief summary and some high-level links for each pericope of the Bible. In a sense this expanded proposal is to build that out further by (a) vastly expanding the types of questions users might be asking of Logos for a given scripture passage; (b) making that available for all verses of the Bible; and (c) making that linkable to the current Bible passage being studied.

I'll stop here for now. Thoughts?

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1240993#Comment_1240993

I see some real possibilities in heading this direction. I need some time to mull over how comprehensive the FAQ questions would need to be to cover the variety of Bible criticism methods and devotional methods.

GregW

I think that some prebuilt layouts would be really helpful, especially if they highlighted good use of resources. I’ve been using Logos most days since 2009, and it is only recently that I realised just how useful the Cited By tool is when combined with a Collection. I’ve been getting a bit more interested in the Church Fathers, and set up a Fathers Collection, which I then included in Cited By, and then created a layout including (among others) a Bible and the Cited By panel. Thus, as I work through a passage, I can now see very easily what the Church Fathers said about a particular passage or verse and how they understood it.

if prebuilt layouts were available in the app, even just as examples, I would have been able to get up to speed much more quickly, and would have recognised the power of the software much sooner - the Cited By tool has all sorts of great uses. I still don’t really use Power Lookup or Information, as I constantly forget what they do (I remember that one of them shows all footnotes very nicely), but if layouts were prebuilt showing good uses for them I’d have found that really helpful. I think that Wordsearch users would probably also have been onboarded much more painlessly if layouts were available with prebuilt link sets, as they were accustomed to.

Alongside layouts, I would also like to see some prebuilt Collections and Series. The Fathers example above is one that needed me to tag all the books, and it would be really helpful if BDAG and HALOT were a prebuilt series. If they were, a link set layout would automatically show the selected word in the appropriate lexicon. I’d also like to see resources pretagged with set categories, to save some of the work of tagging resources which is probably the one thing we all do with similar tags to make our libraries more useful.

John Fidel

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1241031#Comment_1241031

While prebuilt layouts would be beneficial, I think they should contain customized guides. Actually, if customers would learn how to customize the guides, that alone would be very beneficial. I use custom guides to direct my studies along with those guides being included in saved layouts. The latest free webinar by MP demonstrated this very well.

MJ. Smith

https://community.logos.com/discussion/comment/1241120#Comment_1241120

I think they should contain customized guides

I agree. I always use either a guide section or customized guide.