ANÁLISIS DE LOS RESULTADOS

0 2 4 6 8 10 No of users 1 2 3 4 5

Very helpul <---> Not at all helpful Overall helpfulness

Figure 1: Showing perceived helpfulness (1 = very helpful & 5 = no help at all)

There were a total of 18 responses to this question. The results obtained are shown in figure 1 above. As can be seen from the results above, half of the users (9/18) felt that WMSS would be useful to them in the future, 39% (7/18) had no strong opinion either way. Only 11% (2/18) felt that it would be little or no help to them.

Some of the comments users made in relation to this question.

Respondents were asked to comment on their responses to this question and these have been summarised below.

Reasons why people felt WMSS would be useful

The main reasons people felt WMSS would be helpful related to the way in which it supported their understanding of weed biology and how it could be used to support the weed management planning process. Detailed comments below:

Tool to understand weed biology

• It was helpful in making him understanding and making him think of weed biology and the population of weeds.(2)

• Reference material excellent. The weed encyclopaedia "best I have ever seen" . (4) • Used it as a student tool. Very good as a teaching tool. (7)

• Found the actual weed idea really, really helpful to a farmer as they are not sure of life cycles and things like that, very simple to do. So much better than the first disk she had. (18)

Makes complex task easier

• It distils the knowledge and experience he has on weed management into a usable form. (10)

Good planning tool

• Logging weeds in fields and planning is important. The rotational screen looks useful. (6)

• Useful tool early season e.g. setting up scenarios. Excellent as a piece of software. Would use pre season when he has time. (11)

• Rotations screen was a good thing. Just being able to change things so easily and see so quickly and easily the effect that was great.(14)

More robust than previous versions

• Easy to put inputs in.(5)

• Felt this version was easier to use and had less glitches than the other version. He could see what it was telling him. (15)

Keeps up to date with changing products

• Useful where new chemicals come along as long as it is kept up to date and you can trust the results.(8)

Reasons why people didn’t think it was/would be helpful

The main reasons that people didn’t think that WMSS would be helpful appear to be their lack of faith or trust in the output it provides and the difficulty they find in using it. Detailed comments listed below:

Ease of use/fit to task

• If he wanted to spray for OSR in peas he would use ?basogeam, the system says to use full rate but he would not use full rate. (3)

• Didn’t get on with it very well at the start. Couldn’t get it to work properly. (6)

• Would it be possible to have an icon on the desk to go straight to WMSS rather than through Dessac (8)

• Found it difficult to follow. Didn’t know what it was telling him. Cultivations confused him.(9) • The problem is lack of time as it takes a bit of getting used to.(11)

• Some of the ways it looked at things weren’t as he would have looked at them. Entering things into it , e.g. if he wanted to sow rape early and BG was one of the weeds when he did suggest treatments it changed the rape to late, he cant sow late as he wont get a crop (14)

• If he got into using it, it would be more useful. He makes mistakes and gets things wrong at the moment as it is not familiar to him yet. (16)

• Far too complicated. Takes too long to put stuff in and difficult to get stuff out. Better to just look it up in a book, the whole thing is so long winded he would just never use it. Doesn’t like the main screen one little bit. (17)

• Downside was it wasn’t as straightforward as they had to swap between lots of different areas and screens. (18)

• Couldn’t alter non-inversion in the rotational screen. Tried right clicking and nothing happened for the cultivation. We changed this during the interview and it all now works. (18)

Belief/trust in system output

• It has to meet his concerns about outputs. It needs ironed out as sometimes it was just recommending cultivations as the only thing in the treatment list. Needs more herbicides. Too narrow a selection at the moment, he wants them all. (6)

• Think the main thing is that he didn’t trust what it was telling him to do. As a farmer the weed tends to be the same field on field so he has more knowledge of the weeds than WMSS.(8) • It doesn’t cover all the problems he’s had in his fields. He has a lack of trust with what its

calculating as the outputs are not what he would have thought. (12)

System stability

• System is unstable at times and often crashes. That’s the main problem. (4)

Lack of flexibility

• Only criticism is the lack of range of herbs and lack of flexibility with tank mixes. Should be made as close to real life as possible. (13)

Reasons why people weren’t sure either way

Most people who weren’t sure either way gave either reasons for using it or for not using it and these have been summarised in the headings above. Others were not sure because they felt they had not had enough time to evaluate it. Specific comments were:

• Depends whether being used as a planning tool or an in the field tool. More useful as a planning tool. Very good theoretical tool but has to take into account all the idiosyncrasies of an individual farm. (3)

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2.2.2 On a scale of 1-5, (1 being very likely and 5 being very unlikely) how likely is it that you