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.
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?
Participants
In addition to the planned LPDAAC trip, the following people volunteered to participate in a usability study during the Earthdata Search webinar. See attached spreadsheet for additional information such as name and affiliation.
NSIDC User Services, via Amy Steiker (uso@nsidc.org)
0:10 - 0:30: Day-to-day task walkthrough (how does the participant use software in their day-to-day activities–EDSC or not)
0:30 - 0:45: EDSC-specific participant tasks
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.
Webinar Top Feature Requests / Improvements
We asked webinar attendees which features they'd most likely to see. These are the answers:
Event Related Searches (33 people)
Parameter Level Facets (8 people)
Improved Relevancy Rankings (7 people)
Better OPeNDAP Tie-Ins (4 people)
(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)"
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.
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