Work : Open Source + Public Data Innovators

Open Source + Public Data Innovators

User Research, Strategy, Design, Writing (instructional + marketing), and Usability Testing

Key challenge: enabling ease of browsing and strategic use of large sets of open source or public data.

Part of landing page interface design for Museum of the City of New York (joint project with Analogous Studio)

Summary

Several nonprofit organizations and one startup I've supported have open source or public datasets at the center of their offering. Effective design for these platforms required a thoughtful investigation of how massive datasets can be useful, accessible,
and manageable to a variety of users.

Media Cloud: (joint collaboration of the Center for Civic Media at MIT and Harvard Berkman-Klein Center for Internet & Society) In-depth user research project with funders and creators of documentary media, including the Ford Foundation and the Sundance Institute, to explore potential the usefulness of Media Cloud, a global news media analysis platform. My tasks included project scoping, heuristic UX and learning experience analysis, analyzing complex data visualization functionality, task analysis, strategy, conducting user interviews and a participatory workshop, creating an in-depth user research report, and writing a Getting Started guide that I usability tested.

Planet OS: Based in the USA and Tallinn, Estonia, Planet OS is an API provider and custom integration service that gives software developers the ability to easily work with multiple earth science datasets to create applications for sectors such as renewable energy. I focused on engagement as well as usability issues for browsing a large number of datasets and testing out the API, along with improving the UX writing on the landing and marketing pages.

Museum of the City of New York: Goal of this project was to create an intuitive, beautiful, easy to browse/search and purchase interface for museum artifacts and prints. Paradigm of default sorting by borough reinforced this museum’s positioning as uniquely New York-focused. This design process incorporated rapid prototyping for pitch work, as well as close collaboration and overlap of roles between my wireframing and the Visual Designer's interactive refinement. Interviews and consulting on the search and purchase process were part of the service analysis.

Also see The Restart Project in Online Communities.

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Media Cloud - overview

I was hired as a contractor by the Center for Civic Media at MIT to support user experience and instructional design efforts for the open source Media Cloud global news analysis application. The limited budget for my contract came from Purple States, a documentary film production organization who had used Media Cloud and wanted the larger documentary funding and filmmaking community to learn about it.

Media Cloud - team and scope

TEAM: I worked mostly with the Community Manager/Lead Researcher who introduced the application at various conferences.

SCOPE: My deliverables were somewhat loosely defined, but the team felt that user research and instructional design on a Getting Started Guide would be the most helpful to their small nonprofit startup, although I also completed a heuristic and learning experience review. There was a heavy emphasis on user research.