New Frameworks

We gathered a ton of information while we were at AGU. In order to make sense of it all, we actually designed some new frameworks that gave us a fuller understanding of what we had collectively learned.

The first two new frameworks developed directly from our co-design experiences. We had several methods of conducting co-designs, but two of them in particular needed to be visualized so that we could clearly map out what we were learning from the individuals we spoke to. The first of those methods was a puzzle, of sorts. We gave users a set of paper widgets that they could modify and place on a blank page that represented a computer screen. If we didn’t have a widget they wanted, they could make it — and if they didn’t like any of our widgets, they weren’t obligated to use them. We did this with the HydroShare “Create a Resource” process, trying to determine what people wanted/needed out of that workflow. We also tested a “Dashboard” page that would serve as a landing page for after a user has logged in to HydroShare. As each person moved pieces around on their paper screens, we asked questions about their choices and took notes on the thoughts they voiced. Thus, at the end of each co-design session, we had a multitude of notes and a visual representation of a computer screen to map them to. To make those connections, we put notes on stickies and connected those stickies to their respective widgets on the user’s paper prototype. An example Dashboard page is pictured below.

Stickies (light blue) with notes from the co-design are grouped near the widget(s) they relate to, and arrows define the connections more concretely.

The other method of co-design that we documented visually was a website walk-through. We had multiple people explore the website, telling us what they expected from what they encountered, what they might hope for from HydroShare, and the impressions they were left with. Those notes were then grouped by category so that we could see where different individuals’ thoughts overlapped.

Our “website wall,” with walk-through notes grouped by category. Clockwise from the top left, categories are: groups, creating a resource, resources themselves, discover map function, discover/search in general. The middle two stickies are notes on apps.

When we got back from AGU, we started trying to distill what ideas came out of our conversations and whether or not it would be reasonable to work on those ideas. The framework we developed for that compares the importance of each idea with the feasibility of tackling that idea within the time we have left for this project. Importance was based on the information we got from our users — including our stakeholders at CUAHSI. Feasibility was primarily dependent on the size of the task (and therefore the amount of time/work it would take to complete). This visual is helping us determine what exactly we’re going to focus on this semester, and what that will look like.

Each team member contributed their own takeaways from AGU.

The final piece is a spectrum we developed to help us communicate what our efforts might look like for different tasks. Some items, we’ll be able to address but only to a descriptive degree. Others, we might be able to make high-fidelity prototypes for. We’ve used this spectrum to discuss what our deliverables might look like at the end of the semester. Our understanding at this point is that we’ll likely have a mixture of deliverables, few of which will land on the right side of the spectrum and perhaps more of which will fall toward the left side.

This spectrum has been really useful so far in addressing the fact that we can’t fully prototype every idea we have, or even every idea that we want to address.

As we move forward, we’re using these frameworks and even more to tie everything we learned through user engagement last semester to our prototyping decisions this semester.