Interviewing Users

User/Developer Experience Webinars feature speakers who highlight best practices and challenges for usable scientific software. Have a suggestion for a future meeting? Use this Google form to propose ideas.

Deborah Bard presents: Listening for the Real Problems: What User Interviews Revealed About the American Science Cloud

The American Science Cloud is part of the Genesis Mission platform, and will provide AI services to DOE scientists. It’s a fast-moving project being developed across multiple teams and institutions. To understand the experience of its earliest users, we conducted interviews focused on what was working well, where users were struggling, and what they needed next. The interviews revealed that the most significant pain points were not technical. Instead, users struggled with communication, unclear expectations, and difficulty understanding how to navigate a rapidly evolving project. In this talk, I will describe how user interviews helped us identify these issues, distinguish platform problems from organizational ones, and prioritize improvements that might otherwise have been overlooked.

Hannah Cohoon presents: Tips for Conducting User Interviews

An interview is not the same thing as a conversation and you need some training to gather reliable data. I will present key tips for conducting user interviews so that you avoid bias and capture the important details you need from users. We’ll use audience polls to practice what we learn and attendees will leave with resources to help them plan and conduct their future interviews.

Presenters

• Deborah Bard (NERSC)
• Johanna (Hannah) Cohoon (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)

Organizer

• Johanna (Hannah) Cohoon (Lawrence Berkeley National Lab)

Presenter bios

Debbie Bard is a physicist with 20 years of experience working in cosmology, particle physics, AI and HPC. She heads the Science Engagement and Workflows department at NERSC, providing HPC, data, and AI services to over 12,000 users. She has led major projects integrating multi-facility computing infrastructure, including LBNL’s Superfacility initiative. She is Product Manager for the American Science Cloud (part of the DOE’s Genesis Mission AI Platform), a new distributed AI infrastructure platform for DOE researchers.

Johanna (Hannah) Cohoon is a User Experience Researcher at LBNL, seeking to create more rewarding and impactful careers for research software engineers and more efficient and enjoyable experiences for users. She has focused on studying and facilitating open source development, open science practices, and data intensive workflows. Hannah earned her PhD from the University of Texas at Austin.