Growing & Tending User Experience Resources for Scientific Software Communities
BSSw Fellow Drew Paine is developing an online open community hub, UX in Science, that coalesces and advocates resources for scientific user experience (UX) knowledge and resources. This hub will enable two goals. First is to help existing working groups and teams across organizations more formally share their efforts and outputs to grow the burgeoning scientific UX community. Second, UX in Science will provide a curated environment for broader scientific software development communities (such as BSSw) to turn to for a wide range of trusted information. This will help scientific software developers more easily be able to learn new skills that advance their own practices in resource limited environments, furthering workforce development.
The UX in Science website will create and organize interactive written and video content from various teams, existing working groups from US-RSE and CASS, and beyond. Examples may include concise tutorials on UX research methods to clarify product requirements and user needs, how to do a design evaluation, or how to define value propositions from a scientific user perspective. These curated materials will enable a wide range of scientific software teams to better incorporate UX approaches into their practices, become aware of each other's work, and learn how to better advocate these practices to others. In addition to establishing the hub, this project will work to foster community contributions and feedback on materials with research software engineers and teams at different organizations, socialize efforts via webinars and other virtual community events, and participate in community conferences.
Drew is a User Experience Research Lead in the Scientific Data Division (SciData) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL). He completed his PhD in Human Centered Design & Engineering at the University of Washington in 2016 with a dissertation studying the software infrastructure work of a radio cosmology research group. Prior to his PhD he earned a BS in Software Engineering from Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology. Since his PhD he has conducted user experience research at LBNL and Google Cloud. His career is driven by continued curiosity in the ways people collaborate to do complex work across computing ecosystems. This has primarily resulted in a focus on how scientists do research via software as a core scientific instrument and resource. This is essential as artificial intelligence (AI) systems augment the varied arrangements of humans doing science today. Currently, Paine leads a variety of product and user experience research (UXR) efforts, including: work on the STRUDEL project building usable scientific web app resources; requirements and workflow user experience for the Department of Energy High Performance Data Facility (HPDF) project establishing a scientific data facility; and the Secure Use of AI effort within Trusted CI the NSF Cybersecurity Center of Excellence guiding higher education and cyberinfrastructure operators in the safe adoption and use of AI systems. As an active member of the BSSw, US-RSE, and CASS communities, he advocates for improving user and developer experiences in scientific software infrastructure efforts so that research work can be accomplished in a more reliable, productive, and effective manner.
