Background.
Over the past 13 years, the DMP Tool has grown from a grassroots tool to one that serves thousands of universities across multiple continents. In it’s latest phase it’s evolving into a way to meet research funder requirements for machine-actionable data management and sharing plans (DMSPs).
Goals.
After an initial phase of work in 2023, DMP Tool asked us back to help them to realise their ambitious plans to expand the usefulness of the tool as well as it’s ease of use and accessibility.
The goals of the latest phase of the project were to:
- Improve the overall User Experience of the tool
- Add machine-actionable functionality
- Rebuild the DMP Tool from the ground up to better accommodate new functionality and structural changes
Strategy, consultation and delivery.
Work kicked off in early 2024 with a 1-week discovery session facilitated by Cazinc. We took the DMP Tool team through various exercises designed to deepen our shared understanding of goals and priorities, as well as to tease out any “wouldn’t it be good if…” ideas.
We wireframed all pages in the the new interface, looking for ways to simplify work flows and make what is at it’s core a pretty complex process as intuitive as possible.
Once the build started, we continued to expand and refine the UI as new realisations and ideas became more clear.