Design Frameworks: Digitized
As a refresher, the goal of our project is to identify common pain points associated with using HydroShare and design solutions to address those pain points. You can see more about our goals and process in our project blueprint, which can be found here. Throughout our process, we’ve interacted with a number of users and learned a lot about the common workflows and pain points of HydroShare. A large part of our process in the recent weeks has been devoted to developing generalized frameworks to capture our insights and the trends of our users
So far we’ve presented rationale behind using different frameworks and the rough drafts of what we’ve done so far. Today, we have polished, coherent versions of our most impactful works! These design documents also tell the story of how our design process flows. The frameworks we’ve developed are more intentionally described in Andrew’s post on frameworks.
We started with the people portraits gathered out of our user interviews, and then plotted our individual people on a 2x2 of the axes we established as most important to the formation of personas. In this project, we decided that 1 axis should be a scale from creating data to consuming data, and the other axis is focus of data use from solely academic to pure application.
We then made a venn diagram of the traits we clustered together as grouped by each persona. We pulled from quotes attributed to each people portrait, and found what characteristics are unique to each persona, and what is shared.
We then made fleshed-out personas. Personas are disscussed more in depth in Patrick’s post on personas.
We identified 5 core principles as well, and placed our three personas on one scale for each principle, showing how greatly each principle matters to each persona.
In addition to principles, we identified how each persona would ideally interact with HydroShare, and how HydroShare currently functions. This came to life in a framework we’ve dubbed “Should/Does,” and there is one for each persona.
Finally, we made a map of where we think HydroShare can be headed in the future. After mapping out how personas interact with HydroShare, we realized there are two strong directions this tool can take, illustrated below on the left and right sides of the image. We know HydroShare can fit either as an end-to-end solution or as an integrated tool for very specific steps in users’ workflows. The next steps of this project will focus on finding the right balance on this scale for our users.
