Free support at support.pstnet.com
mccarth...@gmail.com
Boiler plate: While I worked as a Technical Consultant at
Psychology Software Tools for over four years, I am no longer affiliated with the
company and anything I write here is my own opinion.
____________
I have wanted to ask the Google group a question for a long time now:
What brings people to the Google Group for support instead of going to the web support site, support.pstnet.com? Support is free for most users and there is a new user forum over there (https://support.pstnet.com/categories/20140047-E-Prime-User-Forum). I know that there are some topics that are beyond the scope of support that can only be covered here, so I'm certainly not trying to knock the Google Group in any way, it is an important supplement. I am honestly just curious about people’s preferences.
____________
I also wanted to give you a little “behind the scenes” of being a Technical Consultant at PST since yesterday was my last day there:
1) The Product Service and Support department is only staffed by about four Tech Consultants plus a manager to cover the entire user base. Most have bachelor’s degrees in Psychology. Besides support requests/e-mails, they also handle phone support, webinars, creating how-to videos and knowledge base articles, staffing trade shows, and other assorted tasks for other departments. Something I love about PST is the extent that my coworkers really care about the users and are very dedicated to improving their knowledge of the products and helping people as much as possible. (Remember, I don’t work there anymore, so they’re not paying me to say this!)
2) PST as a whole has about 40 employees, all of whom are based in Pittsburgh, PA when they're not traveling all over the world. I left the company because I moving to Menlo Park, CA and I’m not so keen on a 2,600 mile commute. Contrary to a somewhat popular belief, E-Prime is not the name of the company.
3) I tend to be cautious about updating software in general (here’s looking at you, iOS 6) but I am confident enough in new E-Prime releases to know that if they get released to the public, they’re worth the update. I was there for at least four updates. Each release was significantly better than the last and was free for existing users. Unless you’re in the middle of data collection or can’t update for reasons listed on the download page in the website, I’ve secretly dreamt of showing up outside your university’s psychology department with a megaphone and a picket sign showing a link to the download page. I know very well that mixed labs with multiple versions can get complicated, but I also know it can get sorted out by working with someone from support because I’ve done it.
4) They have a very, very competitive Halloween costume contest each year: https://www.facebook.com/PsychologySoftwareTools/photos_stream
5) This Hasp key and E-Prime 2.0 CD costume was so good, it deserved its own number on this list: https://www.facebook.com/PsychologySoftwareTools/photos/pb.241802160683.-2207520000.1394858474./10151710229700684/?type=3&theater\
This reminds me, I can finally admit that I get irritated by the term “dongle”. PST calls it a Hasp key.
6) I had to fight the urge to write List just there. (E-Objects are capitalized in writing.)
7) There are fancy potluck lunches and a beer fridge on site for Beer Fridays after work.
8) As a result of writing so many support requests, I have developed a deep and abiding love for writing in the form of numbered lists.
jacant...@gmail.com
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John
Jo...@JohnAllen.IT
David Vinson
About my own uses of various forms of support, I've been using E-Prime
from early on (formerly a user of MEL Pro). At that time PST support
seemed to be very patchy - no way of predicting response times (days?
weeks? longer?)
I was also not very good at formulating questions that were clear enough
to get a good answer - instead a request for clarification and all the
back-and-forth could take weeks. I guess some of this may have been due
to the relationship between between development and support during the
lengthy beta phase..... from the user side not helped by the
incompleteness of documentation.
At the same time the peer community was developing and becoming a good
place to get very quick answers and ideas from people who had been
trying to do the same things (contrast to the old PST online forum where
most questions went unanswered), as well as suggestions about effective
design and so on. And all those conversations are readily visible to
anyone who wants to go searching for them, in contrast to support
conversations which are not visible to anyone else (perhaps this is
different for the new forum?)
That said, I have used PST support requests for certain things: where I
have a development problem or crashing behaviour and the obvious
fixes/program simplification haven't solved it. About 20 or so in total,
and since about summer 2010 I have found that responsiveness is far
quicker and in most cases the PST support person has been able to help
sort out the problem (or suggest a reasonable alternative).
> This reminds me, I can finally admit that I get irritated by the term
> “dongle”. PST calls it a Hasp key.
>
> 6) I had to fight the urge to write List just there. (E-Objects are
> capitalized in writing.)
>
> 7) There are fancy potluck lunches and a beer fridge on site for Beer
> Fridays after work.
>
> 8) As a result of writing so many support requests, I have developed a
> deep and abiding love for writing in the form of numbered lists.
>
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google
> Groups "E-Prime" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send
> an email to e-prime+u...@googlegroups.com
> https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/e-prime/da5418b5-eb97-42f8-a9e8-f9ef1fa7c0d6%40googlegroups.com
David Vinson, Ph.D.
ESRC Research Fellow
Cognitive, Perceptual and Brain Sciences Research Department
University College London
26 Bedford Way, London WC1H 0AP
Tel +44 (0)20 7679 5311 (UCL internal ext. 25311)
Cognitology
Hi all,
Why mailinglist instead of support? I think John, below, already tackles most of it. To add:
· I like mailing lists. Particularly because I am bad at keeping up with websites, forums, and modern equivalents (say, facebook, but worse, LinkedIn). However, I generally will read an Emails sooner or later. Possibly, I am like many here in that I used to read email with a 28k8 modem and the whole idea of some kind of user forum would be ridiculously expensive.
· There are clear benefits to open threads instead of personal, support calls. If there are about four people at PST who do support, imagine how many people throughout the world are actually also doing E-Prime support without being on PST’s payroll. I, for one, but quite a few on this list, I imagine J. So, the list has – as has the forum – helped quite a few people so far. It’s also quite nice to help people, particularly if you imagine that all answers can and will later be found by others who are stuck.
· Finally, many have been on here for quite some years (how long? What was it, before it turned googlegroup?). It’s a reasonably open community, so to speak, in a way that product support isn’t (even though it does seem like a nice place to work!).
The list was really interesting, by the way. Personally, I’m quite fond of the word “dongle”, it’s such a clumsy pseudo-onomatopoeia, I wonder who first came up with the word?
Best,
Michiel
PS: www.e-primer.com (still working on it)
To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/e-prime/CAAT4JdQXdSjt6Y%2BJ4TfrwnXVOLOaNo8Ou_kWhX7J2FjMb9CPwA%40mail.gmail.com.