Case Study: Open Geoportal Harvester

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my role: UX and design lead

Overview/Background

Tufts Geospatial Services, in collaboration with GeoCat, Harvard, MIT and others, desired to develop a new open source cloud based web application for the  automated harvesting of metadata. Their hope was to develop a tool that could create a custom OGP or Geonetwork instance that included only select records. The application will facilitate the import and export of geospatial metadata records from the OGP cloud of metadata (currently around 80,000 metadata records). It will also provide a crosswalk to/from multiple metadata formats.  

Research

I met with key stakeholders and potential users to not only understand the process of developing geospatial data but also to develop design requirements for the potential UI. I prepared a competitive analysis and expert review of similar applications. User testing with competing applications was also conducted in order to find potential opportunities for innovation.

 

 Execution

I established an information architecture and working closely with the project developers I created various low fidelity wireframes that were then tested as paper prototypes with potential users. While testing was underway I created an identity and began exploring design patterns for the application. Once finalized designs were provided to developers as annotated comps to ensure consistency.

Results

The application is currently in development.