How Early Adopter Feedback Drives Scholar@UC Development

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Scholar@UC’s development is largely informed by the feedback we get from our Early Adopters. Early Adopters are the UC faculty members who are making the earliest use of Scholar@UC and providing valuable insights to our Early Adopter Working Group on issues related to submission, description, and sharing within the repository.

So what happens to this feedback once the Early Adopter Working Group receives it? It is passed on to the Use Cases Working Group, and the feedback is transformed into a list of recommendations for the development team behind Scholar@UC (these are alternately referred to as use cases or user stories — the two are often used interchangeably even though there have been attempts to articulate the differences between the two). The Use Cases Working Group issues use cases similar to the following (all can be viewed here):

As a: repository submitter
I want: the input form to visually flag which specific fields need to be filled out if I submit an incomplete record
So that: I don’t have to click on each field to see if it is required
Done looks like: indication next to required fields such as “error” or “required” in red if incomplete record is submitted

The Development Team then takes these various Early Adopter cases into consideration to prioritize what features to work on next. In the last several months, the following issues have been addressed, based on the feedback from our Early Adopters:

  • Improving and redesigning the the submission form
  • A new Help page
  • Allowing upload of multiple files from the user’s local desktop (multiple file upload was already available through cloud services, including Box, Dropbox and Google Drive)
  • Ability to filter search results by subject, discipline, etc.
  • Display of a permalink in the work record
  • Creating automated email communications for an expiring embargo

The Development Team continues to work on the following issues, brought forward due to Early Adopter feedback:

  • Developing a “license picker” for those who want to add a Creative Commons license to their work
  • Determining a maximum file size for upload
  • Zotero integration
  • Building a “progress indicator” to display how much remaining time is left when uploading a large file

If you are currently using Scholar@UC and have ideas for functionality you would like to see in the future, please contact Eira Tansey, chair of the Use Cases Working Group.