AGU Day 2

Yesterday was our second day at AGU’s fall meeting, and the first day with our booth open all day. The booth gives us a great opportunity to meet people interested in CUAHSI, HydroShare, and our SCOPE project. Not only do we get a space for interested people to come to us to learn more and potentially become codesign partners, but we got a space to actually carry out quick codesigns with anyone who took the time to stop by. All in all, we got almost 20 codesign sessions in one day, in our filtering, dashboard, and resource creation categories.

We spent nearly the entire day learning more about how our users would ideally work in all 3 areas. The filtering task was already described and depicted in our previous post, as was the dashboard building task. We used the same paper prototyping methods we described yesterday for dashboard creation and prototyping the create a resource workflow as well.

One user’s sorts for variable and attribute. We’ve been seeing type of data and variable as synonymous fields, and attributes like ranges and resolutions. This informs our choices in building out the search and filter functionality.

When breaking down the three types of codesign, we’ve done about 9 sorts on filtering. Our most interesting takeaway? All 9 people we worked with picked temporal resolution, spatial resolution, and geographic area as the most important categories for filtering data. HydroShare doesn’t currently offer these 3 filters, or at least in the way people want. You CAN currently filter by latitude and longitude, but that’s not the variable format users actually look for. HydroShare also does have a map feature, but users have been dissatisfied with how long it takes to load and how unusable it feels. Ideally, they’d like to be able to draw a box over a generalized area, because it also navigates potential differences like latitude and longitude vs. USGS’ HUC data.

From our codesigns on the dashboard, we’ve found that there is a wide array of functionalities and ways people would like to use a dashboard. We’ve had people prioritize recent activity from their groups, their own recent activity, and an all-inclusive search. We’ve also talked with people who found search to be important, but not the main focus, of dashboard.

Quick actions have been a new capability not currently addressed in HydroShare, and pretty well adopted by codesign participants. One partner added the idea of a resource center for data and program managers, which would take users to the already existing resources from CUAHSI. We learned some users actually wouldn’t need creating a resource as a quick action, while others would always want it there, even when searching through their own files.

One user’s dashboard, which tracked their contributions as a metric. We’re seeing a preference for group activity to be separated from following activity, and the user’s own recent activity. We’re also finding some UI preferences towards breaking up text with appropriate icons.

We’ve realized there’s a wide variety of possibilities for the create a resource function. The necessary components for creating a new resource can vary wildly depending on why you make one; for example, if you’re making publicly funded research publicly available, you’ll need to reference your funding source upon creation. Some users also need to edit how the article may be cited, so there needs to be a function that lets users edit the auto-generated resource citation. Things like title and abstract don’t actually become as important as data type (flow, temperature, etc.) and keywords that make it searchable. There’s also a need to distinguish between publishing something, which gets a DOI and makes the resource a permanent fixture, and just saving a resource, which does not generate a DOI but could allow for more private edits.

We got a great idea to work the “create” page into 1 central resource editing paget that is the only page you see when you go to edit a resource, and if you select a resource just to examine it further, you see the same page in a non-editable format. It’s a pretty powerful idea to consolidate all the different pages and clickthroughs into the same, simplified format. We also know that our paper index cards could only go so far in fully realizing this page, but it’s an important connection between paper UIs we can capture in photographs, and the whole user workflow that accompanies the discussion and process of placing components and fitting them into the HydroShare experience.

Envisioning the Create A Resource page as one longer, more general “resource landing page.” This user preferred to scroll down two pages than click through a two-step process, and this longer page is the same format every time someone wants to examine a resource. They also distinguished between the publish and save actions, and make clear the citation should be editable by whomever can edit the resource (owner, lab team, etc.).

Finally, we continued to walk through poster sessions to look for more data tools similar to ours. Our biggest conversation was with GeoHub, a hub of tools for data analysis. Like HydroShare, GeoHub works on top of iRODS, a file server for very large, data-intensive files. It offers a suite of specialized applications for everything from Global-to-Local systems analysis to transforming data on climate variability and change for cereal crop producers. There’s an OAuth relationship between HydroShare and GeoHub, so users of one product can easily log on to the other. Ideally, GeoHub’s applications will soon be extensible to HydroShare. We’re looking more into learning from GeoHub’s user experience journey specifically, and seeing how we could leverage that partnership into a potential vision for HydroShare’s future user experience.