Software is a crucial part of most researchers’ and educators’ daily lives: we use software to collect and analyse data, curate literature to read, write and edit papers, prepare teaching materials, grade assignments, etc. ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) and support teams at institutions realised these needs and began making software available for everyone in the organizations to use through purchasing, serving and maintaining of institutional copies of software. This saves researchers the hassle and money of buying their own licenses and updating the software, and at the same time lowers the risk of data and security breaches.

As the number and diversity of software used by researchers grow, these “institutional software catalogues” become bigger and harder to maintain and navigate. With modern search engines, in some cases, researchers would rather search for and buy their own copy of the software than trying to find an institutional license. There is a need to rethink how these catalogues can be designed to offer unique values to its users (beyond what a search engine can) and to lower the workload for the maintenance and support teams.

As a first part of our design process, it is vital to understand and map what users’ needs are: how do researchers discover, select, install and use software for their research tasks? What are the pain points within that process, and how could it have been better? We decided to set up a value proposition design workshop with researchers (based on the Strategyzer’s value proposition design canvas and the accompanying book) with researchers with the aim of clarifying our understanding of their needs.

We worked with 8 participants from different faculties. In the 1-hour workshop, we first asked them to individually write down their jobs, pains and gains with regards to discovering, selecting, installing and using software in their research. They were also asked to rank their most important job, most extreme pain and most essential gain.  

As they wrote down and told the group their experiences and thoughts, it becomes clear that some of these experiences, pains and gains are common between the researchers. We share a summary of the workshop output below. 

We worked with 8 participants from different faculties. In the 1-hour workshop, we first asked them to individually write down their jobs, pains and gains with regards to discovering, selecting, installing and using software in their research. They were also asked to rank their most important job, most extreme pain and most essential gain.  

As they wrote down and told the group their experiences and thoughts, it becomes clear that some of these experiences, pains and gains are common between the researchers. We share a summary of the workshop output below. 

Our user profile: jobs, pains and gains 

Finding the right software to use is time-consuming and difficult 

Most workshop participants find it difficult to effectively find and compare between software alternatives, particularly for discipline-specific activities. Researchers often rely on some colleagues’ and field experts’ recommendations, and in many cases, researchers resort to trial-and-error to find the most suitable software. There is a lack of a clear institutional point of contact for software-related issues and advice.

Compatibility issues complicate this task: researchers must make sure that the chosen software is compatible with their collaborators’ operating systems as well as their own, and that the collaborators also have the software license. Other considerations include cost and whether the software is open source – it will be nice to have easily accessible information on free and/or open-source alternatives.

Finally, some participants have trouble finding up-to-date information on the institutional licenses that TU Delft has, while others are not sure how the licenses work.  

Installation is not always straight-forward 

Remote work during the pandemic means that some researchers cannot access equipment in their offices and need to use their private laptops at home. This makes installing software more challenging as researchers can no longer just go to ICT service-points directly for support. It is also unclear whether or how one can use institutional licenses on private machines.

Additionally, in our quick raise-of-hand exercise during the workshop, half the researchers (4 out of 8) regularly use Linux. Participants reflected that it is typically more difficult to obtain information regarding Linux-compatible software alternatives or support – there is a need to evaluate how to make our resources and services more friendly for Linux users.

A strong need for reliable data storage and handling solutions 

While TU Delft provides and supports multiple solutions for data storage, we need to explore how we can demonstrate the reliability and user-friendliness of our data storage solutions and build trust. 

Researchers also want to be able to collaborate and share data and findings, and use software that can facilitate these collaborations.

Our solutions should relief pain and create gains 

This user profile that we’ve co-built with our users helps us prioritise the development of features and services, to focus on tackling the most extreme pains and creating essential gains. For example: 

• Provide clear, easily comparable information about operating system compatibility, available licenses or their pricing, data security and privacy, etc.
• Make sure researchers can access help quickly when needed
• Offer ways to provide feedback, e.g. when users come across outdated information

This is only the beginning! We would like to run a few more of these workshops, perhaps with researchers from other faculties and career stages, to build a more complete user profile.   

To create a sustainable solution, we also need to make sure that not only users’ needs are met, but that everyone involved in designing, implementing and maintaining the solution would have the expertise, capacity and resources to do so effectively. For this, we hope to run similar workshops with different stakeholders involved, to also understand their tasks, challenges and wants, and ultimately to design a user-driven, sustainable solution. 

Lessons learnt 

Overall, we have succeeded in taking a first step towards the goal of bringing end users closer to our research support work. Here, we share a few lessons that we learnt throughout the design and planning of this workshop: 

• It is crucial to ask the right questions, so that participants can recall specific experiences when thinking about jobs, pains and gains. 
  • We discussed both what we want and do not want to help us scope the question, e.g. we wanted to focus on participants’ experience with finding technological solutions (e.g. data transfer, storage and compute), but not with human solutions (e.g. someone not replying to their emails) 
  • We gave examples of what we wanted for each of the jobs, pains and gains; we asked participants to be as specific as possible 

• Researchers’ time is extremely valuable – we thought hard about what they would get in return: 
  • We primarily approached members of faculty PhD boards and councils; part of their role is to represent the PhD students within their faculties, and this then is an opportunity that fits within their role 
  • We also promised to keep them in the loop and acknowledge their help in the output 
  • Moving onwards, we think it is important to explore more, different and better ways to reward contributors 

• Stakeholders’ expectation management is challenging 
  • Users are not the only stakeholders- we need to understand the concerns and challenges faced by solution providers in order to design a sustainable solution 
  • This design approach and type of exercise can be foreign to many; we still need to learn how to get our stakeholders’ buy-in to maximise the value we can get from this process and output  

Please let us know in the comments section if you have similar experiences – we would love to hear and learn from you. 

Workshop contributors

• Participants: 
  • Agnes Broer (LR) 
  • Stephan de Hoop (CiTG) 
  • Mariska Koning (CiTG) 
  • Annika Krieger (TNW) 
  • Yuxin Liu (LR) 
  • Sven Pfeiffer (LR) 
  • Stefania Usai (TNW) 
  • Hongpeng Zhou (3mE) 

• Design and implementation:
  • Meta Keijzer-de Ruijter 
  • Masha Rudneva 
  • Emmy Tsang