Improving How Users Experience the ALCF
A user-focused customer experience strategy to support scientific researchers.
BACKGROUND
Through executing ALCF’s marketing and messaging activities, I’ve learned how all the parts of the facility intersect, and noticed that at the heart of the intersection lies our users. This intersection is not well-designed and is often an afterthought. This realization has inspired my inner problem-solving skills to explore the measures we can take to provide a better overall experience for our users.
APPROACH
I take every chance offered to improve touch points with our users, slowly working on the overall service design of the facility. I’ve made improvements in all of our user messaging. Now, I am leading the web redesign project with a focus on user documentation and designing the user interface for our new user accounting system.
I’ve helped frame our user documentation needs by asking: “How Might We”:
help new users learn how to run on our systems?
direct users on setting up their accounts?
teach PIs to assign proxies and add their team members to the project?
welcome new users to our facility?
point users to relevant information to manage their project allocations?
RESULTS
REthinking OUR USER DOCUMENTATION
In order to help these researchers move science forward, we need to rethink our approach to online documentation for our supercomputers to provide better user support. Our current online guides were built in 2011 and are outdated and need of our attention. A week-long deepdive in UX provided me with insights on how to rebuild documentation centered around the needs of our supercomputer users.
INTERFACE DESIGN FOR USER ACCOUNT APPLICATION
This project is a multiphase project, starting with reengineering the entire underlying system to bring it into today’s programming standards.