Overall Goal

The purpose of usability testing for Earchdata Search is to watch real users attempt tasks that are designed to lead users down a path that touches on key tools and features. Validation that these tools are intuitive or feedback on what could be improved upon are both good outcomes of a testing session.

See also EED Usability Testing for a general usability testing process overview

Questions to Answer

• What are the key difficulties that people encounter when visiting the site?
• Is the "Download All" paradigm sufficient , or is a positive selection (shopping cart) mechanism necessary?
• How important is discoverability and relevance, given the way people typically search?
• At what point do the map and timeline become useful / at what point are they in the way?

Tentative Interview Schedule

• 0:00 - 0:10: Subject setup, introductions, pre-interview Q&A
• 0:10 - 0:30: EDSC-specific participant tasks
• 0:30 - 0:45: Day-to-day task walkthrough (how does the participant use software in their day-to-day activities–EDSC or not)
• 0:45 - 0:50: Follow-up Q&A
• 0:50 - 1:00: Tear-down, prep for next participant

We need to remain flexible here and swap out some of this for either A) more Q&A and interview-type questions or B) more software and EDSC-specific tasks and observation based on what the day-to-day of each participant looks like.

Initial Questionnaire

1. What is your position title and role within the Earthdata community?
2. Do you currently use (or have you used) Earthdata Search (https://search.earthdata.nasa.gov/) in your current job capacity?
3. Do you currently use (or have you used) any other search, discovery or visualization tools in your current job capacity (this could be an EOSDIS application, DAAC application or other 3rd-party application)? If yes, please list the applications.
4. If you answered yes to (2) or (3), please estimate how many hours each week you spend with these applications.
5. What is your largest pain-point when using search and discovery applications?
6. What would be your top feature request for the application you use the most in your day-to-day tasks?

Webinar Top Feature Requests / Improvements

We asked webinar attendees which features they'd most likely to see. These are the answers:

1. Event Related Searches (33 people)
2. Parameter Level Facets (8 people)
3. Improved Relevancy Rankings (7 people)
4. Better OPeNDAP Tie-Ins (4 people)
5. (Write-in) More flexible subsetting (1 person)

Note: The vast majority of attendees identified themselves as "Researcher/Decision Support- I need the data for my research/application(s)"

Barriers To Use

We asked webinar attendees what would prevent them from using Earthdata Search today. Note that some of the answers seem to treat the question as hypothetical, i.e. if suchandsuch were a problem I wouldn't use Earthdata Search, regardless of whether suchandsuch actually is a problem. These are the answers, in no particular order:

• Time from discovery to data access
• Interpretation of data (4 people said this. Unclear as to what this means, though)
• Temporal resolution vs spatial resolution
• Understanding the data itself
• Network congestion
• If the website is slow to respond to changes

• I will definitely need to practice so that I understand what we just discussed.

• I followed Patrick, but I coulnd see any snowcover data in January 2016? (Note: This is potentially a relevancy issue with several very similar-looking collections, only some of which have visualizations)

• How to download subsetting for multiple sites?

• Data formats (3 people said this)

• and where is the multiband radar imagery??  Oh yeah...NASA still does not have radar satellites

• access to free tools for processing digital

Note: The vast majority of attendees identified themselves as "Researcher/Decision Support- I need the data for my research/application(s)"

Usability Study Action Items

Following each study, findings and recommendations are presented to ESDIS. Once those have been presented and reviewed, corresponding JIRA tickets are created to begin the work-off process. See the links below for an overview of tickets created from past usability study sessions.