Chris Gadze

Chris Gadze, Grambling State University

Data Pathfinders: A GDEX UX/UI Intern Quest Redesigning the Scientific Data Journey

Recorded Talk

The Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX; gdex.ucar.edu) is NSF NCAR's platform for discovering and accessing Earth system science data, and supports a large community of users conducting atmospheric and geoscience research. This project evaluated and redesigned the GDEX user experience through a user-centered, task-based usability study, with a goal of improving the scientific discovery of GDEX data and services. Ten participants completed structured tasks reflecting core GDEX workflows, including filtered search, identifying analysis-ready formats such as Zarr, locating datasets by geographic location, and finding metadata about datasets. Session observations and recorded video reviews, transcripts, and participant comments were analyzed per user, then synthesized through cross-user thematic analysis to distinguish isolated issues from recurring pain points. Each issue was scored with a prioritization framework including Nielsen’s 10 Usability Heuristics and relevance to FAIR (Findable, Accessible, Interoperable, Reusable) data principles. High-priority findings, including non-intuitive data access behavior, low visibility of dataset formats, filtering difficulties, etc., directly informed redesigned homepage and search page experiences, prototyped in Figma and implemented in the existing Django/Wagtail codebase. A second round of A/B testing validated key design decisions and surfaced remaining refinements, demonstrating an evidence-based path toward more discoverable, accessible, and reusable scientific data.

Mentors: Tom Cram, Riley Conroe, Calie Payne, Nick Cote, Leigh Harney

Slides and poster