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1.b Department Teams

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Brendan edited this page Jul 31, 2023 · 1 revision

Design System

A cohesive design system is important for cross-team design of Orcasound webpages and web-apps. Our ever-evolving design system needs constant updating as new design trends and practices as well as introduction of new web technology create a need to provide a cohesive design approach.

Orcasound’s design system is made up of 3 parts:

  1. Style Guide
  2. Component Library
  3. Pattern Library

Design Systems 101- NNg

Each will be created and curated in a Figma file (https://www.figma.com/file/YunjBU0bjoDbHcYLNScAQ2/Design-System?type=design&node-id=0%3A1&mode=design&t=iaI90rbztbsYuXZE-1).

We have decided to use Material Design (https://m3.material.io/) as our Design System.

If you would like to work on keeping our design system up to date, please post a message in the Slack channel linked below.

Personae Development

Based on a usability study conducted in the spring of 2020, it was discovered that Orcasound users differed in the way they interacted with the website and listening web app. After discussions with Scott, a persona development study was conducted to explore if conceived user types were true.

3 main personae were discovered because of the persona discovery study:

  1. The New/Infrequent User
  2. The Concerned Citizen Scientist
  3. The Professional Marine Scientist

However, the 2020 study was flawed, as the rigor was lacking in questions asked and not enough participants were interviewed. Also, additional personae and sub-personae are theorized to exist. Persona development is an ongoing process, as personas are always changing over time. A long-term persona development project needs to be formed, pulling in data from specific persona studies as well as data from other research studies.

If you would like to volunteer on the personae development team, please post a message in the Slack channel linked below.

Analytics

Past research conducted on Orcasound personae have shown that different user segments interact with Orcasound in different ways. Understanding how users interact with the Orcasound website and web-apps using analytics is another piece to understanding how to better meet user needs. User behavior during listening events on the listening web-app, for example, is critical to understand from an analytics perspective. Many questions arise based on how users could use the website, and analytics can point us in the right direction when it comes to generating discovery research plans, usability studies, and persona development research.

Making sure that all new web pages and web-apps are instrumented for desired analytic data is also an important part of this team.

If you would like to help us understand our user behavior via Google Analytics, please post a message in the Slack channel linked below.

Content Strategy

As Orcasound scales to impact marine conservation and to meet the needs of its users, content strategy becomes increasingly important. As new features and web apps are conceived, researched, designed, and sent to production, the evolving architecture of the website needs to be easily navigable, and information needs to be easy to locate for users.

An open card sort study was run in 2020 to define the site map for the Orcasound redesign. This user-centric site map has been used to determine the design for the header and footer navigation bars, and main pages for the different “areas” of Orcasound- Learn, Get Involved, etc. The card sort study did not provide a true quantitative measure as it was run with a limited number of participants. An updated card sort study could be run with Orcasound users with a statistically significant number of participants to update our understanding of a user-centric information architecture of the website.

UX Team member Rafa has conducted an internal card sort study (2022-2023) that identified how to better organize content on each web page in the site map: (https://www.figma.com/file/fvkS0gV3v2KcQK9NgZfpUN/Card-sorting-from-Thematic-analysis_shared?node-id=363-5952&t=65MdWDr7Qke1H7OM-4).

Defining a user-centric site map is an ongoing discussion and project. IA studies are needed to further understand how the Orcasound web experience should be structured as new projects create new content pages and web apps.

If you would like to help us understand how to improve our user-centric information architecture for Orcasound, please post a message in the Slack channel linked below.

Onboarding

In the past, onboarding of new volunteers was facilitated by one person and all information was provided in text documentation. A new volunteer’s experience of onboarding was varied depending on when they joined and who facilitated it.

  1. Step 1: Register on DemocracyLab
  2. Step 2: Receive a personal greeting from the UX Team leader
  3. Step 3: Team leader would provide documentation for the volunteer to read and links to the tools used to participate
  4. Step 4: After reading the documentation and joining the relevant tools the volunteer would decide what projects to join and start attending meetings

If you would like to help improve the onboarding experience for fellow volunteers and/or help onboard new volunteers, please post a message in the Slack channel linked below.

ReOps

Research Operations is a critical piece of UX Research at Orcasound. From recruiting study participants, to gaining participant consent, and ensuring participant privacy, ReOps provides the resources and policies required to run an ethical UX Research practice and comply with the law.

The Orcasound UX Team has access to a Mailchimp account with a pool of Orcasound users that have opted into being participants for UX Research studies. Access can be gained by signing into the UX account and accessing the Orcasound UX Gmail account for the one-time access code. Please reach out to @Brendan for access.

To build the Mailchimp account with the pool of Orcasound users that have opted into being participants for UX Research studies, a process has been established. Please reach out to @Brendan to learn more and help with this ongoing task.

We have a consent form that participants must fill out before they participate in a session. It can be found here: MAKE A COPY: Consent Form. It’s unclear how to have the session moderator fill out the form after the participant- alternative form platforms or solutions would be welcomed!

If you would like to understand what persona type your participants fit within, some are tagged in the Mailchimp account. For those who are not tagged, there is a short form in Mailchimp they can fill out, and the answers reviewed to place them in the correct persona type. Please reach out to @Brendan to learn more.

Since Orcasound is a collection of volunteers, we do not have a budget. Please use free resources. You are not encouraged to pay for resources out of your own pocket, but you may if you want to. Orcasound is not liable when a volunteer uses a paid resource to conduct Orcasound UX work and is not a representative of volunteers regarding any contracts entered into by Orcasound volunteers.

If you would like to help us provide research resources to Orcasound UX Researchers, please post a message in the Slack channel linked below.

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