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?

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)

• peter.rodriguez@utoronto.ca

• jcknop01@smumn.edu

• mariapescobarr@gmail.com

• jerovr@gmail.com

• estrescaires@gmail.com

• John_Hermance@Brown.Edu

• aldo.tapia.a@gmail.com

• brian_huberty@fws.gov

• hjkim@urthecast.com

• rong.j.yu@gmail.com

• dirkthielen@gmail.com

• bpinedaf@gmail.com

• bconnolly3@gmail.com

• mark.thomas@duke.edu

• geonova5@hotmail.com

• haronxaud@gmail.com

• crestre@hpcf.upr.edu

• jswia001@ucr.edu

• n.kinar@usask.ca

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)"

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