Usability Testing: Raising the Bar for Scientific Data Portals
Abstract
Much progress has been made in developing backend technologies that improve the sharing and use of disparate data via data portals. Less attention has been paid to the frontend, or the user experience. One effective and low-cost method for improving the user experience of a data portal is usability testing.
Usability testing incorporates direct feedback from the user community. A typical approach involves a volunteer who, at the prompting of a facilitator, is asked to accomplish a task such as retrieving a particular set of data from a data portal. As the user walks through various scenarios while 'thinking aloud,' the development team observes from a remote location and notes pain points and bottlenecks. These observations are then used to help drive improvements to the interface. Studies have shown that conducting as few as five usability tests is sufficient to gain most of the benefit. In this presentation we describe developing a 'sun-to-mud' space weather data portal in concert with usability testing. The University of Colorado Boulder's Space Weather Technology Research and Education Center (SWx-TREC) is developing a Space Weather Portal to provide students and scientists access to cross-disciplinary space weather data that in the past was dispersed across various institutions and websites. As part of SWx-TREC, the LASP Web Team has adapted a process outlined by Krug (2010) to integrate usability testing into development of the portal now found at http://lasp.colorado.edu/space-weather-portal . Approximately once a month, a user is asked to participate in a usability test for the portal. The issues identified during the session are then addressed in the next development cycle and are integral to how the portal's systems and capabilities grow and evolve. We find that regular usability testing, in addition to revealing problems, streamlines development efforts, inspires new features, and increases community involvement. In the spirit of TRUST, usability testing is an essential, yet often overlooked, resource for meeting user expectations while increasing data sharing and use.- Publication:
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AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2019
- Bibcode:
- 2019AGUFMIN23A..04K
- Keywords:
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- 1912 Data management;
- preservation;
- rescue;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1930 Data and information governance;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1982 Standards;
- INFORMATICS;
- 1998 Workflow;
- INFORMATICS