recent umich school of information masters graduate | ux & data specialist for hire
Umich Center For Sustainable Systems
SEP - DEC 2018
Overview
I worked with two of my fellow students for a semester performing an in-depth audit of the resource organization system at the University of Michigan's Center for Sustainable Systems using contextual inquiry. We performed planned interviews with staff and researchers, collected affinity notes, made an affinity wall (seen in the image above), and performed formal analyses to identify the center's real organizational issues and make insightful, innovative recommendations for the center to implement.
Information Collection
The center maintains a central hard drive to store their research. One side is shared: all staff and students can access it. The other side is an archive of material submitted by researchers (students) when they leave, packaged and handled entirely by permanent staff. Staff were concerned with how disorganized the shared side of the drive was and how backed up they were with packaging materials for submissions to the archive. After meeting with our client initially, we designed separate interview protocols for the program director, permanent staff, and research students at the center. We conducted these interviews and took notes both during the session and again while listening to recordings of these sessions.
Analysis
Taking our notes from all these sessions, we created an affinity wall (see image above). We organized the snippets and statements from interviews into groups based on common theme then organized these groups into higher level groups to gain insight into the real problems behind the drive's disorganization. We then brainstormed different solutions to these problems and performed an analysis based on weighted priorities and outcomes.
Ultimate Recommendations
Our ultimate suggestions were threefold: first, to address the communication issues at the root of the permanent staff's problems; second, to develop some sort of standardization or metadata-based system to deal with the complex structure of the data stored on the hard drive; and finally, to implement a form of remote version control to make remote connection to the drive a more intuitive part of researchers' work flow.
Students and staff ultimately had different priorities when it came to the use of the shared hard drive, which led to a number of communication problems. We suggested a more formalized on-boarding process to keep everyone at the center on the same page in addition to some centralized communication platforms to encourage a culture of open communication at the center. Because staff were reluctant to move the drive to an alternate and more accessible platform, like Google Drive, we suggested implementation of remote version control through GitHub so researchers wouldn't have to depend on a clunky VPN system to get access to the drive from their laptops.