AGU Day 3
Today we still had a good number of codesigns, but had more of an emphasis on working with the full HydroShare team to present the work we’ve done thus far and getting good feedback from the team. We also welcomed Patrick to NOLA (he arrived late on the 12th) and said goodbye to Andrew and Keenan with a tear in his eye as they headed back to Boston after our presentation. It’s currently Celina, Patrick, and myself holding down the AGU fort.
Our presentation was early this morning, and we spent time going over all our work thus far, especially the digitized documents like personas. We started discussions with the team which will definitely lead us into revising these living documents and putting more background into each one. For example, the distinction between tenured professors and non tenured professors will come into play. Non-tenured professors seem to focus more on publishing, which leads us to Resolute Riley’s quote, “publish or perish.”
We also started a solid conversation about our map of HydroShare’s direction, using our map of HydroShare’s potential future. We were glad to see the whole team believed this to be a worthwhile conversation, and a question that isn’t fully answered. We’re moving forward with our work investigating user narratives in part to figure out what kind of tool users need: a complete, end to end solution, a short, integrated tool at the end of workflow, or something in between.
This discussion also spurred an important distinction which we want to make now: photos of our codesigns may look just like user interface codesigns, but the dynamic conversations and placements of all our components actually works to service the user’s preferred workflow. We ask questions like, “what would you expect if you pushed this next,” and, “so this looks like it assumes [insert here], can we work around that assumption?” We need to know how the user wants to experience an entire feature, or how they need to work, before we can worry about things like shape of widget or button color.
To cap off our presentation and discussion slot, we began the conversation with HydroShare’s development team on collaboration in implementing design recommendations with enough speed that they can create functioning prototypes for our work. We now know the most useful deliverables are collaborative, sustained conversations instead of a monolithic, isolated report at the end. In the coming semester, we’ll be integrating the development team into our weekly liaison calls when possible, and begin more looking into the feasibility of the features we want to build out the most
In the second half of our day, we focused on more user interactions and codesigns! Today we worked with the create-a-resource component codesign we’ve been using thus far, as well as a new codesign style we had not yet broken out: Resource Type Cards. These cards just contained the words that are options in the Discover tab’s “filter by type” dropdown menu, and the intent is to learn how people understand the site’s verbiage, and what is actually relevant to their work.
Today codesign came with a twist: we got to work with our HydroShare team members. It was interesting to work with the team who actually made HydroShare, because a large number of idealistic “I wish” type scenarios from the development team came out. We developed the idea for a dynamic preview of data while creating the resource, and we found why some resource types could potentially make others obsolete. This time, we took away a lot more understanding of why metadata really does make HydroShare unique from other file sharing services, and how it could be time to collapse and overhaul the different types of files and systems in HydroShare as a whole
We also got the chance to talk with more users about Create and the cards. As we’ve made more and more Create codesigns, it’s becoming more clear who our different users are, and how they interact with their data. People more interested in sharing and searching seem to invest more time in data attributes like temporal resolution (and we’re learning that “metadata” is HS’s approach to these attributes). People more interested in publishing are most invested in a streamlined process to get the DOI and put the funding source number with the file upload. We can take this back to our personas and next make detailed user narratives around resource creation.
We’ve only just begun to use cards for resource type with users, but so far it’s clear that few people outside the CUAHSI/HydroShare team understand what ALL the types are, and some consolidation could happen. We asked participants just to turn over cards they didn’t recognize, and then cards they didn’t ever use. The mismatch in cards stems from soaking in cultural knowledge, so even if a research has never used MODFLOW data, they’ve read about it and can make a conjecture as to its applications. We also saw interest in categorizing instrumentation and methods-specific data, in order to connect researchers using niche tools.
Walking back from the conference center, we did some quick approximations, and found that by the end of the week, we’ll have put in about 160 person-hours into this project, which equates to about 5 Wednesdays. We’re already stoked about the immense progress we’ve made, and are gearing up for one last day of conference madness!
Look out tomorrow for our blog post about AGU day 4!
