News

We made a presentation for the OSDP Hackathon.

Our focus was on improvement of the Open Science and Data Platform search from UX perspective. After attempting to procure datasets related to wildfires from the database, we realized that the main entry point to the platform, and one of the greatest potential pain points, was the search function. We evaluated the search as being inconsistent and unintuitive, especially for users without an academic background.

After extensive testing, we came up with a list of suggestions to make the search more useful and understandable. These recommendations included giving all filter categories the same toggle to set whether results must match all or any of the selected options, tooltips to explain options in the search, and aesthetic tweaks that cut down on excess information.

The full list of suggestions can be found in our hackathon document. Below is our Figma mockup of an updated OSDP search.