starting with UX — permadata blog #1

last few days, I greatly enjoyed the afternoon sun at my urban garden. A lot of talks with neighbors & parks workers just gave me some new ideas in this low interest period (I was needed outside)

since the release of permadata.net v.3 & the v.4 POC development, I felt the need to re-think my product with a more UX-oriented approach. The main goals was not clear and, consequently, v.3’s views & development started to become unclear too, with such symptoms as :

• technical formatting, with bad ergonomic (no data display prioritization, too much inputs on the data form ..)
• low user time ROI, due to small added value on each interactions
• splat concerns on views, bringing pain points for the user
• not standardized design process, leading to existing & new features slow development
• little changes of data structures leading to exponential refactoring

with the exceptional amount of additions in the v.3, all these struggles was meant to pop : the project was not initialy thought for covering such a large area &, most of all, it had been built with my technical vision to achieve specific tasks, but not clearly designed as a whole for users

the UX knowledge I just came across recently just pointed out some way to improve interactions with my tool. I really want to try/use/master these & permadata seems to be a perfect use case

defining goals

I would underline the fact that there are two distinct goal categories to meet :

• users’ goals
• my own goals

this second group is a bit blurry for me. I could easily sum up all my current knowledge of the subject with a dumb : more users, more data (& reversed)

for the first group, as opposite, UX processes give us a lot of useful advices to articulate thinking & doing phases. That’s what we’ll see here & as it is a new subject for me, feel free to add your own opinion to the topic

archetypes vs personas

I would call archetype, in the field of UX, a themed-focused abstract user. Just think about how classes represent a character in role playing games. Archetypes could serve as main “thematic” goals

all users don’t go on an application for the same reason, but still, they can share motivation, values &, more pertinent for us, group of actions (that’s what I would call edge-specialization). One short sentence should be enough to identify archetypes

so, in my RPG you could be a mix of :

1. a contributor; manage data atoms, plant references & data sources
2. a data crawler; explore plant of interest page data
3. a garden member; use the garden tracker features

personas consume these archetypes as values (let’s say percentages) to be defined as the sum of all these scores. I’m now thinking about my previous game comparison :

• you could add specialization & talents to maximize persona customization
• edge-specializations should be defined for cross-domain concerns

they could also represent extreme users on their own field. Personas can be somehow derivative from these raw traits to ease the process of imagination. Same idea : one sentence/a single group of tags

• [contributor ->] Raymonde, botany book worm glad to share
• [contributor ->] Bubakr, pharma/herbo university student geek
• [contributor ->] Lila, conviced user serving the cause in spare time
• [data crawler ->] Noël, food self-sustaining countryside family father
• [data crawler ->] Thierry, wild tisane harvester knowing the topic
• [data crawler ->] Farida, urban small exploitation project initiator
• [garden member ->] Maëlle, starting gardening outside in suburbs with her older brother & her father
• [garden member ->] Nicolas, occasional urban shared garden user
• [garden member ->] Jeanne, large integrated permaculture land owner w/co-workers

in the next week, I’ll be confronting these subjective portraits by conducting little interview with people passing by my garden. I do want to extract knowledge about what to prioritize; more than the features itself, which have to be roughly thought upstream

that’s what user goals will help us to obtain. From my own goals to the potential users of permadata, a lot of answers have to be brought

user goals

as a freelance developer I usually worked with a really simple process : I make what my employer tell me to do. It’s a robotic job, I consume specs to build features

that’s an important point to get in mind. This is what I’ll have to produce to my robot-me for him to process the application development

now consider that, we are, from a project manager point of view, so conceptual that it put us at the exact opposite of these expectations. So, let’s start the breaking process by defining user goals, which will help us then to obtain : use cases, features & views

another point before we begin. I’m honest with myself & really contextual : for a moment I will be the only user, provisioning data & developing features long enough for an alpha/beta release

it, indeed, does make a lot of weight in features prioritization. Still, I want to take the bigger picture first to avoid the developer bias I mentioned before

I’ll now enter an empathic mindset about my personas, trying to imagining the why [they are here, their goals] & the how [do they achieve these goals in time]

raymonde

hi, I’m Raymonde. I use to go to the public library to read books about the local flora. It’s really useful when we go to hike with my senior group : we often talk about the plant we come across during our day-trekking

my flat also got a quite large veranda where I like to grow small exotic flowers & aromatic herbs. I like to speak to shared urban gardeners for advices, or just to encourage them

I take notes when I find an interesting fact. Something that could be shared with my group, that could improve the well-being of my veranda’s plants, that could answer a question we had with a gardener

my children & grandchildren know me for my endless thirst of learning about plants. I’m quite proud to tell them that I’m contributing on permadata. I feel modern & active

• contributor : 70%, qualitative contributor, adding “interesting” data based on her interests
• data crawler : 40%, sometimes she want to know more about a specific plant, check redundancy with before adding her notes
• garden manager : 0%, not interested by the scope of the idea, never tried

so, why is she coming on the permadata application ? here we list some of the main use cases :

• [contributor] about a plant, want to add data
• [contributor] from a source:text, want to add data
• [contributor] retrieve, edit & delete her contributions
• [data crawler] search a plant
• [contributor] add a plant (w/names data)
• [data crawer] display plant page (data aggregation)
• [data crawler] on page, access specifically-tagged data group
• [contributor] from data atom, on a plant page, add/delete tag

yes, you saw me coming. Let’s go back to the RPG metaphor : we got our {3} archetypes/classes; listing use cases is like listing classes abilities. The persona/character is specialized by its very abilities/skills/spells

I find relevant to add an single point of focus about our personas. This special need will greatly improve their ability to match their goals, & consequently, improve their experience on the application

in the case of Raymonde, I think that accent should be made on a very basic, comprehensive & comfortable web-desktop application for “technology-challenged” user. Next, I’m going to sum up this basic traits for our whole group of personas

covering all the scope with personas

Bubakr is a more systematic guy. He’ll add data from publications he’s passing by during his studies. He may want to add a lot of data from the same source:text, & accent should be made on his high plant page data consumption

Lila is literally inputting every document she finds : small flyers about plants, books at the library, seed bags details.. She may need a scan to translate pictures into text, & accent should be put on mobile on-the-fly contributor activities

Noël is looking for a medium volume of data about a medium volume of plants & is also casually using the garden manager features. As it is a pretty dense subject, we could start by listing basic usages of this tool

• retrieve seeds list
• retrieve garden list (gardens user is member of)
• about a garden, retrieve zone list
• about a zone, retrieve [plant instance] list
• about a garden, retrieve [plant instance] list

specifically about “building” the garden :

• add, retrieve, edit props, delete garden
• add, retrieve, edit props, delete zone
• add plant to the unaffected zone (individuals or groups)
• retrieve, edit props, delete [plant instance]
• move [plant instance] (taking deeper the research phase will help us to determine which option to chose : change [plant instance] -> zone &/or change zone -> [plant instance])
• change plant state { seed, sown, growing, blooming, fructification, post-harvest states .. }
• split & merge [plant instances] (for groups, ex: planting 10/20 of a single sow session pots in a zone and the remaining 10 in the another)

let’s come back to Noël. This lucky guy is searching specific data about improving his family’s plants’ yield, fighting pests & conservation methods, & accent should be put on data crawler/garden manager cross-interface coherency

Andy likes to experiment new plants on his balcony. He has some perennial small trees & shrubs identified in his permadata garden, that he could then follow despite his busy life. Accent is on the seasonal event tracking/calendar

Thierry sometimes need to look for identification or basic facts while trekking, but most of the time he will just browse chemical composition, medicinal usages & conservation of its harvests. Accent has to be made on low internet speed plant page load

Farida have an eye on six gardens in her city for inspiration, but none is hers. She’s collecting data about all these places in order to apply for installing a medium-sized exploitation in another area of the city

in addition to searching about local plant & companion data, she likes to contribute to these gardens’ online life by posting comments on plant instances & on the garden thread. Accent has to be put on garden plants & comments synthesis on home page

Nicolas wants to know what is growing where in his shared garden (not to damage other peoples’ cultures when planting his owns). With this caution in mind, he’ll put details of his exact actions & check for members’ communication. Accent should be put on an inviting garden interface

Maëlle & her family doesn’t have a lot of plants, but they put a lot of attention in them. They enter a lot of feedback data to synchronize each others, & accent should enforce feedback granularity, but also synthesis

Jeanne is working on her permaculture exploitation with her other co-workers & woofers, whose she mostly communicating with in a written descriptive way through the garden manager. Accent should be made on knowledge persistence

about this last point : I have in mind physical tokens that could link to a specific data fragment, like an printed id code referencing a zone item on the application. Item could be then retrieved with its data & type template

here stop the level of details I can dive in on Medium. Let me work a bit on building an exhaustive list of use cases & scenarios summaries, while I improve my personas’ hypothesis with real-life interviews

next article will be about UML & production of deliverables, at this stage of the design. Stay tuned