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Our team and how we work
Our team is comprised of product managers, user experience researchers, designers and engineers that learn with and from the community to build out the napari hub. Our process involves weekly syncs to track progress across disiplines, review and share assets. Just as our product is open source, we want our process to be open and transparent as well. You can learn more by exploring:
- product strategy documents that inform how we'll make the napari hub a reality
- user experience research findings that help us understand the community's challenges and how the napari hub can help
- design sketches and prototypes that bring napari hub features to life
- engineering specs and diagrams that help us understand how the napari hub works behind the scenes
Here you can find user experience research findings that have helped our team make decisions grounded in community needs and value.
User experience research (UXR) centers on a community of users, employing a series of methodologies to understand who they think and behave, identify their needs/motivations and challenges, evaluate their perception of existing functionality- all to help product teams make informed decisions that will add value to a community. You can learn more about UXR methods here, and more about UX research at CZI here and here.
Background Research on How We Search (Feb 2021)
Goal: This research explores the psychology of search as well as the underlying challenges to plugin exploration voiced by imaging community members in interviews that helped us decide to build the hub.
Impact: background research provides core mental models understanding and grounds out exploratory research in integral user needs and challenges.
Comparative Evaluation of Search Experience Platforms (Feb 2021)
Goal: In order to understand the current search experience both in imaging and the broader mental model, we mapped the search journey using 9 different products ranging from imaging plugin platforms to scientific Python services to the iphone.
Impact: This process helped us identify features and trends to include, design recommendations to explore, and helped us consider what we might need to include in the napari hub.
Focus group interviews and prioritization exercises (March 2021)
Goal: Identify existing mental models for search, evaluation, and sharing of plugins and align on what value an ideal plugin discovery and distribution service would provide. Since we can’t build everything at once, we wanted to prioritize what features were most urgent and valuable early on. We asked focus groups to organize a list of features into “must”, “could”, “should”, and “won’t” haves, and then provided them a “budget” to “buy” a group of features that would make up the V0 product.
Impact: Interviews identified our long term value proposition, defining a northstar to work towards, as well as grounding us in the challenges of the current system that our service should improve. Prioritization exercises helped us understand not just what is asked for, but why features delivers value. The ability to evaluate multiple features in concert with each other provided additional context on how they might work together. The CZI team analyzed the aggregate V0 asks and used them to scope our first release features. We will return to these findings as we build out additional features.
Concept Testing plugin details page design (March 2021)
Goal: Evaluate sentiment towards plugin page layout options to finalize component feature visual design. Use multiple concepts to allow participants to compare feature layouts.
Impact: Changes made to layout to improve clarity and prioritize relevant metadata to ensure page helps user evaluate plugin efficiently.
Usability testing hub experience (April-May 2021)
Goal: evaluate task completion, ease and comprehension sentiment of user journey to search and choose a napari plugin. Identify areas of confusions and opportunities for design improvements prior to development.
Impact: Changes made to layout to improve flow clarity, prioritize relevant metadata, and ensure site allows users to perform tasks as expected.
V1 Work!
Hub Plugin Categories (July-September 2021) Goal: Gain stronger understanding of category content, architecture, and representation will allow our team to make design decisions that improve users’ ability to discover, compare, and evaluate a plugin that “just works” for their need, reducing wasted time in search and instilling more confidence in the ecosystem. A strong framework will help developers place their plugin in context valuable to the end user.
Impact: Changes made to search experience to allow users to explore plugins by grounding dimensions that make sense to them.
This is where you can find designs for the upcoming iteration of the napari hub.
Design works iteratively with both UX research and engineering: The final hub designs are informed by UX research, and sometimes early design works helps to frame research, as in the case of user testing. The design scope of each release is dependent upon both engineering feasibility and user needs.
Design explorations
Designs for user testing
- Prototype for testing the overall flow and landing page design
- Layout options for feedback on the plugin page
v0 final design specifications
(Use the top left section of the sidebar in this Figma file to navigate between final designs for each page of the hub, illustrations and icons, and visual explanations showing how the designs change at various screen widths.) Final designs are subject to slight updates, and also are only considered final for this first release: we will continue to iterate the hub and its design moving forward.
- Infrastructure diagram: lucidchart
- Technical docs