Call for participants -- user mapping and personas workshop

[adrmac]

Calling all stakeholders in the Orcasite project -- engineering, UX, data science, product, marketing.
We would like your input in a collaborative design thinking workshop.
We want to better understand who we are designing for, to build the right product for the right people.
Ideally this is a 1.5-2 hour synchronous session, working remotely in FigJam as a virtual whiteboard tool.

The following deck outlines workshop steps.
https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1uwyGlvt8phOgJgH4il0PGPKS6UoDnO2AuntpHcX5MYc/edit?usp=sharing

Workshop 1: Identify users with the bullseye canvas
FigJam

Workshop 2: Explore user needs with the user profile canvas
FigJam

[adrmac]

Big thanks to @scottveirs @paulcretu @skanderm Brendan, Shweta, and Qianyu for participating in this user definition workshop. In just 2 hours we made a lot of progress in mapping out and prioritizing Orcasound users. Here are some of the key results.

Result 1
We identified 6-7 distinct user types that interact directly with Orcasound app interfaces, and we voted that the top 3 most important ones to focus on, in order, are:

1. Citizen scientists (learning listeners)
2. Moderators (expert listeners)
3. Listening conservationists (passive listeners)

Result 2
We identified 2 indirect user types that don't interact with the app (for now), but may take action on the data it produces:

• Ship captains
• Conservation organizations and agencies

Result 3
We discussed the distinction between a mode of usage that focuses on live real-time data for immediate action, versus looking through data archives and recording libraries. This variable is independent of the type of user -- any of the user types could be in either mode.

• Scientists might perform research on live orca response, or on long-term changes in the ocean soundscape.
• Citizen scientists can listen live, or help label recordings.
• Passive listeners might show up for a live concert, play ambient ocean sounds in their car, or search through a recording library to hear specific kinds of species.

Result 4
We organized user types along an axis from most-to-least time investment in the project, from scientists and expert listeners at the high end, to occasional bout listeners and new users at the low end. We then recognized that users with lower time investments are still critical parts of the project.

• By far, the app's largest group of users are notification subscribers who come to the app to hear bouts, and will most likely never be motivated to contribute to data annotation.
• We believe this group is invested in orca conservation and can be mobilized to support data-driven conservation insights produced by citizen science / machine learning.

[adrmac]

We didn't have time in this session to individually examine the citizen scientist persona or other user types to empathize with those users and identify their tasks, goals, pain points, and success/gains (see the 'user profile canvas' attached above). We will plan to take this on in a future workshop.