SAMS - User Needs

Following UCD according to the DIN ISO 9241-210, all SAMS hardware, software and Api-management project solutions and results are characterized by iterations to meet the user needs and requirements.
All observations and findings describing the user needs and their contexts were collected and documented in a clear structured table. Therefore, the UX Nugget airtable was used, as it is user friendly and offers a collaborative work frame in an effective way to add metadata that can be sorted and filtered according to the researchers needs. Moreover, the UX nuggets can be documented in a way that avoids redundancies, helps to prioritize and enables the researchers to find research gaps and resolve contradictions.

UX Nugget airtable and detail view of insights for one observation.

One major goal of UCD and its user research is to collect valid information about users and their context of use in order to identify user needs. A user need is a prerequisite identified as necessary for a user, or a user group, to achieve a goal, implied or stated within a specific context of use.

Identification and Elaboration of Beekeeper Needs
The user research overview (Table below) summarizes all research phases and the methodologies used in Ethiopia and Indonesia within the SAMS project.

-	Ethiopia	Indonesia
User Research Phase I: Context of Use Analysis	• Interviews and in-depths interviews with beekeepers • Focus Group Discussions with beekeeping experts and beekeeping business stakeholders	• In depth Interviews and contextual inquiry with beekeepers • Focus Group Discussions with beekeepers, researchers, cooperatives, and bee-related experts
User Research Phase II: Context of Use Analysis	• Different beekeepers involved, long-term contextual inquiries with some of the beekeepers	• In depth interviews and contextual inquiries with beekeepers
User Research Phase III: Prototype Evaluation and Context of Use Analysis (iteration)	• DSS usability tests with beekeepers	• In depth interview, learning from extremes methods (recorded video call) with beekeepers: (honey/colony productivity lens) 1 unproductive, 1 productive, (bee colonies quantity lens) 1 grassroot/ community beekeeper, 1 industrial beekeeper * DSS usability testing with recorded video call utilized lookback applications with beekeepers (grassroot beekeepers, establish beekeepers, community beekeeper)

User Research Phase I incl. the first UCD workshop was conducted in 2018. The context of use analysis continued in Research Phase II with evaluations in the second UCD Prototyping Workshop in Bandung/ Indonesia in July 2019; the beekeeper needs, documented in the UX Nugget airtable, were assessed per country by the SAMS team in terms of (a) importance (see Table 3), (b) ability to be solved by the SAMS HIVE monitoring system, (c) ability to be solved by DSS SAMS data display for beekeepers, (d) ability to be solved by a solution on flowering information, (3) ability to be solved by another application on Beekeeping advise and capacity building (see Table 4). User Research Phase III with prototype evaluation started after the second UCD workshop.