Deliverable Decisions
Coming back from winter break, we had lots of information to start working from again. The hard part was, it had been about a month since we had worked directly with anyone, so we needed to really engage and with our findings again somehow.
We used the first couple of weeks of this semester to go over our old frameworks, reminding ourselves of what we knew. In this time we also squeezed new information out of our AGU codesigns, looking back at those frameworks mentioned in the previous blog post. Pouring over those old frameworks reminded us of the knowledge we had about our users and what they’re looking for, plus going over the AGU material gave us specific insights into what was common across our many codesigns. For instance, we noticed that in the Dashboard codesigns, everyone we talked to wanted a global search that could access the entire site. We didn’t anticipate that, but it’s useful information to have gotten from our many interactions at AGU.
Our deepest dive back into what we know happened when we went over our Should/Does framework. We reframed the statements of “HydroShare Should…” and “HydroShare Does…” as “What does HydroShare ideally provide?” This allowed us to once again reimagine HydroShare in terms of what our users need and how those needs relate to each other. It also took us a step away from HydroShare in its current iteration, allowing us to think more blue-sky as opposed to thinking only about what exists now and how it can be modified. Untethering ourselves for a moment from what we’re familiar with gave us a chance to be even more creative in imagining a new HydroShare, which ultimately changed the way we started to work on codesign ideas.
From there, we pulled all of that newly re-hashed information into a decision matrix. We took all the themes and values that came out as important to our users and mapped them onto the list of areas within HydroShare we thought were important to take a look at. Each star on the matrix marks an intersection between the corresponding themes. The more stars a topic or area got, the higher we ranked its importance, and that provided us with the full list of what we’re working on for the rest of the semester — as well as how deep we’re diving into working on each item.
As far as what we’re working on, we identified our “Big 4” things that need to be addressed: My Resources, Dashboard, Discover, and the page that comes up when you open a resource. We also identified a “Small 4:” Accessibility and best practices, the Create a Resource workflow, the login workflow, and group resource ownership.
“Big” and “small” here have the most to do with how much work we’re going to put in, which we’ve determined based on a workload spectrum we also developed this semester. For our big 4, we’re really getting into wireframing and doing a lot of codesign to produce mockups that the dev team can work with. Our smaller four, on the other hand, are most likely to be addressed through written descriptions of what can be done differently. In the case of accessibility and best practices, we’ll also be including external resources that should help with future development.
