State of the Project: Mid-Semester 1

By the end of this semester, we’ll need to produce a report on our progress thus far and our plan for next semester. In order to prepare for that, we’re thinking now about our project narrative and what we hope to deliver in the future.

We’ve been conducting interviews, gathering a lot of helpful information on what people want out of HydroShare. Based on this information, we’re going to start pulling out common pain points, which we’ll document through images of existing UIs from other products/services that work well, storyboards of problematic workflows, and other design frameworks used in human-centered design. We’ll then use those pain points to determine principles — main ideas around which we can center our picture of the ideal HydroShare experience. Our next step from there will be to use those principles and our understanding of our users as people to produce personas that capture users’ values and motivations.

By the end of the semester, we hope to use our personas as a jumping-off point to delve into the ideation/solution space. In order to co-design, we must have some potential solutions (e.g. paper prototypes) or at least areas of focus. Designating a certain number of solutions isn’t especially useful at this stage, but we’re hoping to tackle the highest prioritized problem areas first. The deliverable for this stage will take the form of wireframes — likely paper prototypes or perhaps higher-fidelity design specifications. An example might be a redesign on the ‘Create Account’ and ‘Login’ workflows.

This set of deliverables will show our liaisons we know what we’re doing and serve as a first iteration on the type/quality of documentation we plan on providing in our final deliverables. This is a living, changing process, and we will modify it as necessary to fit the needs of both our team and the HydroShare team. Furthermore, these deliverables should prepare us appropriately for the AGU conference December 11–15th, where we will meet with a diverse set of users and non-users. This conference will be the best opportunity for codesign, so we must be prepared before we get there to make effective use of our time.