1. Reverb Usability Blink UX Study and Reverb User Experience Jeff Siarto UI/UX Design, NASA Earth Data Team

2. Information Architecture & Nomenclature Navigation Framework Branding & Visual Style Content Layout & Web Writing Lists, Details & Comparisons Buttons & Links Forms & Data Entry Feedback & Error Handling, Guidance & Help Home Page Site Search Data Search & Acquisition (scenarios) Reverb Usability Overall Performance DAAC Sites and Reverb

3. Usability Improvements Information architecture & nomenclature –Use consistent, unambiguous, low-acronym nomenclature Facilitate easy comparison in lists of data sets and tools Simplify download & ordering process Communicate scope of site search and any (data) alternatives

4. Usability Improvements Include section overview pages in navigation menus Show clear NASA branding and reduce confusion around the presence of related organizations’ branding and navigation elements Streamline hand-offs to Reverb (from other Earth Data sites)

5. Usability Improvements Give pages a strong visual hierarchy, and emphasize the primary call-to-action Write concise, structured, front-loaded and user-centered text Use progressive disclosure to communicate the key message first, and further information one-click-away

6. Usability Improvements Make help focused & contextual, concise, easily-accessed and minimally disruptive Employ a contextual glossary covering acronyms and more

7. How Did Reverb Fare? Could have been better… Focusing on our poorest scores 45 on Data Search & Acquisition? Oh no! How did that happen? Let’s look at some specifics

8. Who are these guys? Seattle-based UX Research and Design Heuristics, Usability Testing and Eye Tracking Impressive Clients –Boeing –Adobe –Starbucks –Amazon

9. What is Usability? Usability is a quality attribute that assesses how easy user interfaces are to use Utility is an attribute that assesses if an interface does what users need Utility + Usability = Useful

10. Why We Care About Usability If a website is difficult to use, people leave If a user gets lost on a website, they leave If a website can’t answer a user’s question, they leave

11. See the trend?

12. Why We Care About Usability Investing 10% of a project’s budget on usability will (on average) double a website’s desired quality metrics This means… –Cutting training budgets in half –Doubling employee transactions per hour –Doubling sales or the number of registered users –Double the amount of happy earth scientists

13. Who is Reverb’s audience? Do we want to cater to all users? Processing level is a interesting discriminator

14. Key Findings Improve help text and tooltips Re-work order process –Too many steps and inconsistencies –“Billing contact” and “Cart” confused with pay services –More on this later… Improve map selection

15. Low-Hanging Fruit This is one way we are taking an high severity problem and converting it to an actionable NCR within Reverb

16. Low-Hanging Fruit (continued)

17. And Another…

18. One More...

19. Our Plan Start with low-hanging fruit –What can we fix easily? –Translate critiques into NCRs –Prioritize and schedule in upcoming sprint Incorporate Feedback into Operational Concepts –As we propose larger scale changes to Reverb, lets keep this in mind –Data Access and Ordering Workflow Re-work Think about long-term fixes –If collections are hard to find, let’s redesign from the ground up. –Let’s call in for support

20. Our Activities So Far Low-hanging Fruit –10 NCRs generated directly from Blink feedback –Tagged in our tracking tool, Test Track Pro –Scheduling work for an upcoming sprint Order Workflow Operations Concept –Back to the drawing board –Small, but impactful changes

21. In Summary We appreciated the feedback We want to be accessible to a wide variety of users with different levels of prior knowledge We are making short term and longer term plans to incorporate the evaluation’s findings We are planning to spend more time on usability and design moving forward

22. Usability Ombudsman I’m here to help with design, UX and usability issues and questions Will be working with DAACs, Earth Data & ECHO/Reverb Teams jeff@element84.com

23. Questions?