In late September, the GWSC team had the opportunity to meet with some of the folks who use our products. This included people who have specifically requested products from us; analysts from government agencies who also do analysis and synthesis work (though mostly not incorporating water, environment, and climate data); and people making decisions that incorporate water, weather, and climate but who may not have had a chance to see our work. We sat down, laid out some of the work we’ve done, asked a bunch of pointed questions, and listened.
We heard a lot! Unsurprisingly, there were plenty of conflicting opinions, suggestions beyond the scope of work we’re able to do, and intriguing nuggets we’ll have to figure out how to operationalize for our organization. We’ve started the process of coding up these interviews already, to try to bring a little order to the chaos.
But a lot of what we heard are easy wins – straightforward adjustments to make our products easier for our users to, well, use. And we’ve implemented a bunch of these in our first Environmental Insight Brief out the door since our user feedback meetings. This brief zooms in on the water situation in Jordan, spurred by a question about whether a new desalination plant really is going to save the day. Penelope Mitchell dove into the background in this very dry place, Erin Menzies Pluer crunched the past and future rain and temp numbers, and Zachary Goodwin (new to the team!) mapped out the sources and added them up in a very nice infographic.
Some of the feedback we incorporated:
Make the front page matter
All of our briefs are brief, maxing out at four pages plus sources and supplement, but even on these shorties we’ve been adding a cover page so the reader knows what’s inside. Over and over at our meetings we heard the brutal truth that a lot of readers won’t get past that first page, so the cover needs to have content. For Jordan, the cover does serve as a table of contents, but we’ve pulled the bottom line from each inside page, as well as our cool infographic, onto the front page so it can stand alone as a summary document.
Be clear about what the reader needs to know
Even in a short brief, we’re always trying to get in as much info and nuance as possible. Our users told us that’s not helpful: if they have the time to spend, they can go to the same deep dive sources we do. They’re looking to us to know them well enough to tell them what they should pay attention to. Three notable things you’ll see on each page of this brief are:
- Headline titles (and figure captions) that don’t just tell you what the issue is (e.g., supply vs demand) but what you need to know (e.g., supply is insufficient to meet demand)
- BLUF: Have you heard of the Bottom Line Up Front? If not, embrace it! We were skeptical of the need to have an abstract on each page, but it really helps our readers know what’s important. The (sometimes painful) exercise of figuring out what the bottom line is really helpful to us, too!
- Annotations take the mystery out of maps and graphs. Some of us love a really information-dense figure, but not most of our users. Annotations provide the takeaway while literally pointing to the data that support a conclusion.
Connect the text, maps, and graphs
Our readers are racing through our briefs, which often address topics they’re not experts in. Some start with the words, some with the maps or graphs, and they all told us that they want to know exactly how these all fit together. We’d been thinking about maps and graphs as a way to add additional information and nuance. Our users told us that’s not helpful – in real life, they end up missing the thread of how everything fits together. So we’ve added more guideposts to this brief (e.g., “see figure 1”) and made a point of mirroring language in text and maps.
The layout and language of our Jordan brief is far from the last word. We’ll keep adapting and improving as we make new briefs, and we’re excited for our next user meetings. We expect we’ll get another helpful earful!