ATRIUM First Researcher Forum
Improving GoTriple with and for researchers
Researchers working directly with the service providers. Providing feedback on the user interface, current features and possible developments of the GoTriple platform . In a nutshell: to appreciate the experience and opinions of the main users in order to improve the service. This is the purpose of the ATRIUM Researcher Forum. The first edition took place on 17 October in Poznań, Poland, at the Poznań Supercomputing and Networking Centre (PSNC) and was organised by the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences (IBL PAN).
GoTriple is an innovative multilingual discovery platform for the Social Sciences and Humanities (SSH). It is a service included in the ATRIUM Catalogue and provided by the OPERAS Research Infrastructure. The development of the platform involved two key ATRIUM partners: the Italian IT company Net7, one of the principle developers and maintainers of GoTriple, and Foxcub, a French company specialising in data and AI. During the Forum, Polish researchers from the SSH domain met OPERAS, Net7 and Foxcub representatives in two different sessions.
Photo credits: Maciej Rutkowski (PSNC)
Usability testing
In this first part, six researchers with no familiarity in using GoTriple took part in usability tests led by PSNC’s team of user experience experts. They were divided into two sub-groups, one performing tasks in English and the other performing the same tasks in Polish. They described their actions and any difficulties they encountered aloud. The test sessions of the English-speaking group were streamed live into the conference room, where other Forum participants could observe them.
The purpose of these tests was to assess the intuitiveness of the interface and the quality of the results provided by the platform. After the testing phase, the whole group participated in a facilitated discussion led by OPERAS about their experiences in the tests, their first impressions of the platform and their suggestions for improvement.
Photo credits: Maciej Rutkowski (PSNC)
Expert review
For the second part of the Forum, a further six researchers with expertise in similar platforms or experience with GoTriple were invited. In a focus group, the participants shared their insights and suggestions on three pre-selected features of the platform. In a panel discussion, the experts then discussed possible development directions for GoTriple, again based on three pre-selected topics.
Results
The screens were recorded during the usability tests, as was the audio of the expert discussions. In addition, at each stage of the forum, two note-takers actively captured the key points raised by the researchers. The summary of the results will be described in a report by December 2024.
“We still need to analyse all of the data and summarise the results, but we could immediately see how insightful and useful the forum was based on the real needs and experiences of researchers. It also reinforced the importance of the multilingual aspect of GoTriple and gave us valuable information on how to shape the next steps in the development of the platform. In conclusion, the ATRIUM Researcher Forum was very useful and I believe that other ATRIUM services could benefit from this type of event”, underlined Carol Delmazo, OPERAS representative at the Forum and leader of the work package “Fostering Cross-Disciplinary Research through Training and Open Science”.
“The First Researcher Forum was an exciting experience for the ATRIUM team and IBL PAN, as the organisers. We look forward to sharing the event’s results with the wider community and are preparing to organise another ATRIUM event format: the Mutual Learning Exercise, which will take place in the first half of 2025”, said Tomasz Umerle, IBL PAN leader in ATRIUM.