Data Solutions Library
A freely available and searchable tool for data communications from community projects with advanced linking between common terms, and crowdsourced highlights and annotations.
Role
UX Researcher, Designer
Employer
Open Environmental Data Project
Areas
Research, Strategy, UX Design
Tools
Figma, InDesign, ROAM, Coda, Miro
Background
My responsibilities at OEDP included extensive work on their Data Dialogues and Data Solutions Library projects. For Data Dialogues, I worked with and restructured OEDP’s Content Management System (using Coda) as part of my research on participants working with environmental data.
The Data Solutions Library was conceptualized with the goals of:
Increasing the accessibility of data around climate governance and public action in a way that allows for shared data stewardship and management,
situating data in local and cultural context and recognizing traditional data keepers, and
making it easier for organizers in the climate space to share best practices, discoveries, and experiences.
Development
Initial flows and low-fidelity mockups of the Data Solutions Library were informed by research into analogous library systems like ROAM, prioritizing best practice around linking and commenting functionality with selective permissions.
The core user flow for the reader persona consists of an initial data search, which highlights key terms within a given article. The majority of their interactions take place in the data network, which lists other instances of key terms across the library.
Key interactions for the data steward persona include the upload, markup and annotation of articles. The design priority in this case is the ease and accessibility of the highlight, search and comment functionality.
Impact
Initial flows, low-fidelity mockups and a clickable Figma prototype were used as the basis for further user research, which
surfaced additional user needs with regard to enabling more efficient interaction with and analysis of quantitative government data sets, and
led to further iterations on the initial concept, which outlived my tenure with OEDP.
