AGU Wraps Up!
Thursday was our fourth and final day at AGU! Today’s focus was on HydroShare’s groups feature, as well as a final pass at the cards for resource and file types. We also took a short break to do an interview for Story Corps, which can be found here. We only spent a short time on file types, and our main takeaway was that the classifying system needs to be more nuanced than it currently is, because hydrologists just have so many possible things they could need to share; specific model files, code scripts, HydroShare specific time series, and more are all used. One of the HydroShare team members we worked with described the problem best:
“People come to HydroShare with a specific purpose, and have a lot of trouble finding what they need. We just give them everything, and expect them to figure it out.”
Our 4 codesigns on the groups feature (currently labeled as “Collaborate” on the site) started to get more at the actual purpose of groups than just the user workflow and interfaces; This is great because it’s exactly what we still want to find at this stage of the design process. We’re getting to know who are our users are, and along with that comes documenting specific needs and how they’re ideally met. On Thursday, we worked with people who envision using groups for everything from learning from and coordinating with a large research consortium (100+ people) to keeping only the project-specific files for a collaboration on one project between a few people. These are completely different reasons for using the group collaboration tab, but neither outcome is unachievable. With some codesign partners, we paper prototyped a “group projects” feature where these smaller collaborations could be organized inside larger consortia. That’s just an idea though, and could be entirely too much for something that could just turn out to be Dropbox plus metadata.
In addition to the differences in our users’ purposes for working with groups, we found a couple common key functionalities. Almost everyone wanted tools, models, and datasets specific to their group presented in clear sight on the group landing page.All three of these resources were clearly separated from one another in each paper prototype, which is interesting given that all are presented in a mix within HydroShare’s current Discover tab. With these similarities, we know for certain that users do want to share and update their work, and that there is a lack of easy informatic collaboration in the scientific community. The big question we’re looking at is how much structure we want to give users without making the experience overwhelming.
Finally, one of our users pointed out they saw groups as a way to keep HydroShare from feeling like a “data graveyard.” They wanted a dynamic interface that let them know what resources were new, what could be useful, and in general what possibly important work other users were doing. It’s a concept that could actually work its way out of groups and into a landing page or dashboard in general. Moreover, it shows that codesigning on just one feature doesn’t necessarily only lead to insights on that feature; it also brings us back to larger picture of HydroShare and providing just what users need, without making something stagnant or over the top. That’s probably the biggest takeaway from AGU, and we’ll spend the next semester acting on all the information we’ve now gained. We just to take this winter break to digest it all.
Happy Holidays!
