Original Proposal To SEEK Exec Staff

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Here’s the general idea I have for the demo and feedback booth at ESA 2006 next year.

Along with the standard booth where there are LTER brochures, we also have another booth (or extension) next to it where we demo various LNO products, give out free stuff with SEEK and/or LNO logos and also get feedback from users on our products.

We can get feedback by doing surveys and also by doing mini-usability tests. We ask participants to do small sets of tasks that say take 5 and 10 minutes and measure success and get feedback on their interaction with the products. We can structure this so that there are a set of 1 or 2 tasks per product, and a set of 1 or 2 questions we ask. We could also ask them what they would like to do with the products (this is called an open ended task). We might garner ideas for future functionality. Additionally, we also give away some big prize like a gift certificate from Amazon for example. Everyone who participates in a mini test or fills out a questionnaire will be eligible for a chance at the “bigger prize.” In the meantime of course we have those little giveaway prizes everyone likes – pens, stress balls, card holders etc with the LTER and SEEK logos etc.

We could organize our tools into types like data management, modeling etc. or we could do LNO tools and SEEK tools.

The benefits of doing this demo/feedback booth are: -raise awareness of all we are doing -more positive publicity for LNO -add faces to names which makes the LNO more “real” to people -interaction with users who feel like they have input and impact to our tools -feedback on our products so that we can make them better -ideas for new products

I think this will take significant planning and I’m willing to lead this if you guys think it is a good idea and decide to go forward. We’ll need several people to staff things and I’ll be happy to provide some guidelines for how to deal with users during the demos and during the mini usability tests and gathering feedback.

Laura L. Downey Senior Usability Engineer LTER Network Office Department of Biology, MSC03 2020 1 University of New Mexico Albuquerque, NM 87131-0001 505.277.3157 phone 505.277-2541 fax ldowney@lternet.edu