1. OSCAR/Surface Functionality and Usability Assessment
ICG-WIGOS Task Team on OSCAR/Surface
Development
TT-OD-1 – Geneva
OSCAR/Surface Functionality and Usability Assessment
Thinesh Sornalingam

2. Agenda Review TT-OD governance Purpose Use cases
Current OSCAR/Surface features
What is functionality assessment?
Functionality assessment techniques
What is usability assessment?
Usability assessment techniques
Path forward

3. Governance TT-WMD TT-OD ICG-WIGOS Updated version of OS
OS NFP Community
Vendor
Feedback
OSCAR project team
TT-OD
Technical commissions
coordinate
OSCAR Project Committee
Report to
ICG-WIGOS
TT-WMD
Regional Associations
Works closely with and is involved in
oversees

4. Purpose One of the key aims of TT-OD ToR is to:
Gather and relay user feedback on OSCAR/Surface (OS) functionalities and their usability to the project team for consideration/action
The purpose of this session is to discuss the effectiveness and efficiency of the current suite of OS functions.
The goal of this exercise is to work out a path forward on identifying:
OFI (opportunity for improvements) with the current feature set, that will ultimately increase the utility of OSCAR/Surface in it’s mission to best manage and provide access to WIGOS metadata.

5. Subset of use cases

6. Current OS features Key OSCAR/Surface features: User profile
Registration
Login
Search
Quick access
Filter map
Search (basic and advanced)
Station, instrument, contact, citations
Content management
Register new station Register new contact
Anything missing?

7. Functionality assessment
Functionality assessment is the evaluation of a tool’s feature set for it’s effectiveness in achieving the intended goals of the tool.
We want to aim to have the optimal set of features, which will enable users to best manage their data in OSCAR/Surface.
Some questions to explore:
Are the current features sufficient?
Do they work as intended? (e.g.: correctness)
Are there any features missing that would make the tool more useful?
Are there any redundant/unwanted features that should be removed?

8. Functionality assessment technique
How do we assess the feature set?
Group discussions and feedback
What issues have you experienced so far using OS?
What new/update/removed features would make the tool more effective?
Evaluate against requirements, use cases, etc.
Perform user acceptance testing.
Anything else?

9. Usability assessment
Usability assessment is the evaluation of how efficiently can a user use the functions of the tool to accomplish the desired outcome.
A tool can have lots of features, but if the features are not useable (non-intuitive, difficult to learn and navigate, inconsistent results, etc.), this will decrease the effectiveness of the tool.
OSCAR/Surface features must be easy to use, allowing the users to complete the desired task in a timely manner to satisfactory outcomes.

10. Usability assessment (cont.)
Some questions to explore:
Does it take a long time to find a station?
Does it take a long time to add a new station?
Do you find the station registration process efficient and institutive to use?
Does it take a long time to add a new station contact?
Does it take a long time to train a new station contact to use OSCAR/Surface?

11. Usability assessment techniques
A lot of research and development in human-computer interaction
There are a lot of UI usability testing techniques:
Survey:
Questionnaire to the OS NFP community
Expert review:
using a set of heuristics, such as Nielsens’s 10 usability heuristics
Evaluate OSCAR/Surface and identify any violations of the heuristics which can lead to OFIs

12. Usability assessment techniques (cont.)
Remote usability testing:
Watch/record a focused group of users (relatively new to OS) completing tasks. Tester passively observes and records any issues, followed by a questionnaire to the user for feedback.
Anything missing?

13. Path forward
TT-OD’s plan for conducting functionality and usability assessment:
Task
Task description
Lead
Resource(s)
Timeline

14. Thank you
Merci