Practice Abstract - Research and innovation

How to create a user-friendly digital platform for thematic networks

Making a knowledge platform that is user-friendly to end-users is not an easy job. Not every target population (e.g. farmer, foresters, advisors) has the same needs, and more often they have difficulties expressing these needs in ways software developers can understand them. Involving a user-researcher into the project will allow you to detect the problems your target-population is dealing with and together with members of this target population they will come up with possible solutions when creating the digital platform through workshops (e.g. the EURAKNOS workshops in Budapest and Paris), interviews and surveys as well as an information architecture of the kinds of webpages the platform will need (e.g. a homepage, contact page, etc.).



The UX-designer (user experience) uses this information to rapidly design a draft concept of the platform in the form of a clickable prototype (compare it to a PowerPoint presentation which looks and feels like a website). The user-researcher will present this prototype to 5-6 potential end-users (e.g. farmers) in order to get feedback and detect 80% of the most common errors in the prototype (e.g. the menu doesn't us the right categories, the homepage doesn't put the most important information first, etc.). Subsequently, the UX-designer will use this information to improve the prototype so it can be presented to 6 different end-users to verify whether the same issues get mentioned, and/or new (smaller) issues present themselves. By working in this iterative way, we avoid creating a fully developed platform which will not be user-friendly and have very little options to change as the development-phase of a platform is less flexible and the cost of this phase is most often the biggest one.

Source Project
EURAKNOS
Ongoing | 2019-2021
Main funding source
Horizon 2020 (EU Research and Innovation Programme)
Geographical location
Belgium
Project details

Project Keywords