Gathering more information about uses of microscopes.
One of the issues with Open Source microscopes (Open Flexure, FlyPi, Fluopi) is that they don't have the same layout and design of traditional scopes, and therefore are sometimes seens as complicated to use and/or a toy. This prevents more people from using them.
So on a discussion about this with Julian and Jo from the University of Bath we started thinking how can we make these scopes more user friendly.
To learn how we can improve adoption, we thought it would be interesting to learn from users what they use and how they interface with microscopes, so that we can maybe add this experiences to OS microscopes.
This will take the form of a survey, and initial thoughts/questions are as follows:
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What make microscopes intuitive? (People that learn to use one type of optical microscope can easily start using another one).
- Is having more hardware interface (buttons, wheels, joystick) a better idea of easiness of use? Or a great GUI would do the trick?
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What are common features exist between microscope types? (thinking about microscopes that use different "media", laser, non-laser light, AFM, electron, etc).