Putting together UX interviews

These past 5 weeks, we’ve been interviewing users in a new kind of codesign session to talk about very specific uses of HydroShare and to go over our prototypes, put together using Balsamiq. In our previous post, we identified a “Big 4,” or the 4 components we are prototyping out and walking our users through. As a refresher, these 4 are: Discover, My Resources, the resource landing page, and a new dashboard that could become HydroShare’s landing page once users sign in.

Our decision matrix helped confirm that Discover is most connected to the principles and values of our personas, and that it touches the most users’ workflows. In our first semester interviews, we got a lot of constructive comments on Discover, so we felt ready to jump in and create a good number of Balsamiq prototypes. This became our first UX codesign test, wherein we asked users to walk us through how they already use Discover, and then we took a look at our mockups. It’s important to note that our prototypes are images that are not clickable, but we simulate interactivity by flipping through different images. Below are some of our preliminary Discover prototypes (we’ve been updating prototypes in response to user feedback as often as we can).

3 of our Balsamiq mockups for Discover. The bottom left was inspired by the current Discover page, while the top two were developed out of user requests for a coherent map view of data

The HydroShare Discover page as of 3/30/2018. We have users search through this page and show us how they filter and organize data. It inspired the bottom right prototype above.

The next most heavily prototyped member of our Big 4 has been the dashboard. Unlike Discover, the dashboard isn’t currently a part of HydroShare. We’re trying to get a lot of prototyping of both the full dashboard and the individual components, or widgets, to get a complete picture of what users want and need to experience. The development team also already has an idea of HydroShare’s style template, so we don’t need to lose time trying to copy their style in paper prototypes. Instead, we’ve been walking through the full dashboard and alternatives for all widgets with users. Like our Discover prototypes, these are static images, so we simulate what would happen through chosing to interact with different parts of the screen.

Our dashboard is broken into a couple of different widgets: a global search bar, quick actions, My Resources (here also alternatively named My Files and My Content), My Groups, My Contributions, and a newsfeed of recent activity. These widgets came from our codesign activites during AGU, and we’ve been narrowing down what users actually want out of them. In some cases, this means narrowing down the options (like only getting 3 quick actions) and in others it means specifying function (like what users mean when they say they like seeing contributions). Below is one of our in-progress prototypes of a dashboard. Again, we try to update these in reponse to users, and the final product won’t quite look like it does below.

One of our dashboard prototypes. We try to ask users if they want/need the widgets present, what they expect out of each widget, and how they accomplish some of these things already. The dashboard has given opportunity to streamline the entire user experience by giving users the feeling they can get started with work as soon as they sign-in.

We’ve also been working on My Resources and the resource page, but these codesigns have happened indirectly as a result of Discover and dashboard. Insights into the My Files widget above translate to My Resources as a whole, and we’ve been able to make prototypes of alternatives that way. We explore resources when we focus on Discover, so we already touch those insights without having to construct a separate codesign protocol for just Resources.

We took quotes from our users and aggregated them into the framework below, grouping the quotes based on subject. We tried to get a consistent grouping for each of the Big 4, although patterns emerged in general usability or curiosity about HydroShare as a whole. After grouping quotes, we also loosely tied them back to personas. These are loose associations, and in some cases we felt the quote spoke to everyone equally. By attributing some of these quotes to personas, we want to demonstrate that we can still shape HydroShare for a large base of users, who could use the system differently.

A grouping of quotes we recieved from users throughout UX testing sessions over the course of the second semester. Some of these groups are more based on principles, while others are on specific functions. Persona attribution here was done to show how HydroShare can be shaped for different kinds of users.

We’re moving into working more on producing annotated prototypes that capture our insights from these codesign sessions that we want to give to the development team.

Stay tuned for more results!