I joined the Trusted Analytics Platform team to help enhance the user experience, which involved defining users, conducting usability testing, and improving UI design, user documentation, GitHub repositories, and product demonstrations.
I initiated interviews with subject matter experts within our team and recruited both internal and external data scientists to understand their work contexts, motivations, and expertise levels. These insights were consolidated into user definitions to guide our team.
I worked with data scientists to analyze job postings alongside user interviews, aiming to identify popular data science tools and prioritize platform features, considering the possibility that experienced users prefer Command Line Interface (CLI) over Graphical User Interface (GUI) tools.
Using Data Scientist User Definitions derived from the interviews and data scraping, I conducted comprehensive user testing on the current interface, evaluating it through various tasks both qualitatively and quantitatively.
Based on the research, it was identified that documentation was an important part of the experience for data scientists. This prompted the rewrite and reorganization of the wiki documentation for the platform on Github.
VERSION 6.0 (Before Improvements):
https://github.com/trustedanalytics/platform-wiki-0.6/wiki
VERSION 7.0 (After Improvements):
https://github.com/trustedanalytics/platform-wiki-0.7/wiki
The user definitions guided new feature development, and the data scrape led to prioritizing the expansion of Python-based features to reach a wider audience. Insights from usability test sessions led to significant improvements in the web UI and all of the research helped create GitHub Documentation to improve the Out of the Box experience for our target users.