Share
Last week I attended a workshop on open data and resilience at the World Bank in Washington, DC. The workshop was timed with the release of their new field guide that offers practical guidance for governments and organizations as they build their own open data programmes. During one session, I sat with a group that was exploring how to connect open data with the people who are meant to use it.
All of this got me thinking about potential HDX Repository users and how best to categorize their behaviors. A lot of CKAN instances are about releasing government data, so their interfaces are focused on search. We are trying to create a place for humanitarian partners to share, find, use, and even comment on datasets. This makes the technical development more complicated.
User archetypes are one way to break down user behavior, making it easier to determine what to build first and, hopefully, helping your technical lead sleep a little better at night.
Here are the basic HDX user archetypes that I came up with:
The sharer – wants to share data with partners and the public.
Needs: an easy way to upload data; options for sharing data privately or publicly; integration with other data portals (GeoNode, DevInfo, etc) and file sharing services (Dropbox); ability to specify clear terms of use for the data.
The searcher – wants to find data on humanitarian crises.
Needs: reliable search; ability to narrow search results using filters; relevant tags; a way to request a dataset that can’t be found; clear metadata (source, contributor, caveats, license, date collected, etc); dataset preview.
The browser – wants to look around in spare time and see what is new and interesting.
Needs: intuitive navigation; top line metrics on datasets (total # of datasets, recently added/most downloaded data); curated datasets and visualizations; easy navigation to sites outside of HDX.
The busy person – wants to be notified of relevant content; rarely visits the HDX site.
Needs: ability to personalize notifications for new and relevant content (datasets, visuals, blogs); apps for specific data.
The analyst – wants to download data in bulk to run queries and develop models and visualizations.
Needs: data visualization preview; integration with data visualization software and statistical tools; comprehensive metadata; data quality ratings.
The power user – wants it all, i.e. to share, find, analyze and visualize data.
Needs: intuitive navigation; powerful search; easy uploading; clear metrics on datasets and users; data in a variety of formats; integration with sophisticated analysis and visualization tools.
Do any of these archetypes resonate with you? What are we missing? Take the 10-second survey below to help us prioritize what the HDX development team should be working on.
Once we settle on critical technical features, we will be exploring the services we offer with the platform. For example, does ‘the busy person’ need live support, so that she can resolve an issue quickly? Does ‘the browser’ need tutorials or videos to help him learn about the site? Does ‘the power user’ need detailed reference documentation? Tell us what you think.
And special thanks to Abby Baca, John Crowley, Denice Ross, Robert Banick and others for a thoughtful and inspiring discussion last week on meeting user needs.
Sarah – This blog provides a good overview of different stakeholders and their needs. What about the motivation aspect? Becuase a lot of time the sharer needs to be motivated to share the data that they produe.
Hey Sanjay, thanks for taking the time to comment. I agree that data sharing is a big issue. We have heard that one impediment to data sharing is often insecurity around data quality. We are looking at adding a narrative caveat field in the metadata so that data providers can say a bit about the data they are sharing. We will also enable users to share data with only certain people in case there are sensitivities around making it public. I am hoping that we can make the data uploading process as easy and intuitive as possible to encourage data sharing but there is also a culture change around open data that we may need to look at within the humanitarian community. Looking forward to working with you and partners in Nairobi.
These are great Sarah and it’s a pretty complete list. The one “user” it’s easy to forget about is the one who wants to do some or all of the above but has no idea the HDX repository exists! Practically, this means (the majority of) users get to content via search engines (the case for World Bank Data) so it’s important to design any page someone might land on with this in mind.
Hi Tariq, thanks for your comment. We don’t yet come up in Google search so we need to work on that first! But your point is taken – all pages need to be intuitive and we can’t assume someone will read the main ‘about’ page. We hope that people will share links directly to a collection of data or just bookmark the Colombia collections page, for instance. We are working on site documentation now, such as introductory text for each page and user guides. We will share a public beta in a month or so. Lets see how we do. Thanks again