Initial Design Tasks

Our team are not hydrology experts, and hadn’t used the software before. For some initial investigation into HydroShare, we went through a task list of the most common uses / workflows in the HydroShare environment. The landing page for HydroShare looks as follows:

We investigated these six workflows:

1. Discover → discovering new resources and data
2. Create a Resource → workflow of uploading data and creating a new resource
3. Sharing a Resource → workflow of sharing and publishing the resource
4. Adding / Interacting with Groups → workflow of collaborating with other hydrology members
5. Apps → opening and playing with some of the available contained apps
6. Jupyter Notebooks → investigating the homepage and workflow for initial jupyter notebook environment.

These components are the core of HydroShare, and this task allowed us to become familiar with the user interface and existing user experience for new users such as ourselves. Our next steps will be conducting many user interviews with members of the hydrology community that use the software with varying levels of expertise. This will allow us to get background on the existing workflows for users across the spectrum, competitors / alternatives in the same space, and any painpoints in this area.

Go water!