Samantha Lee (UX researcher)

Corey Jackson 

Carsten Oesterlund

Kevin Crowston

Isabella Lena Coieri

Anad Vamsi

Marlene Takou-Ayaoh

1 year, 2023

I was given the task of conducting user research to better understand user needs for a Wiki site that would compliment the Gravity Spy citizen science project

Through user research, we discovered the problems of accessibility, inconsistency, and inefficiency. The page was difficult to navigate causing confusion due to issues with Gravity Spy 1.0. It wasn’t designed to support the types of tasks we were asking volunteers to do. We need to understand how they were using the discussion boards in Gravity Spy and begin to curate information for a wiki site. We needed to understand during which periods of their interaction on Gravity Spy certain information becomes more useful.

My research encompassed interviews with the users as well as coding interviews. I built journey maps to explain to the team what the user findings were. These activities led to several suggestions for designing the wiki.