Instructions for user tests of Sprout

Warning

🚧 This section is still in active development and is subject to changes 🚧

This document provides the context and instructions for users who we ask to come and test out a demo of Sprout. We intended to use this document so that a user can read before they come and do a user test.

For this user test, we’ve made a basic case example that includes three simple test data files.

About Sprout

Sprout is a component of the Seedcase software ecosystem, which is a framework for an open and scalable infrastructure for health data. The Seedcase ecosystem aims to enable researchers to build, manage, and (legally) share health data using modern best practices in data engineering.

Sprout is the component for building or “growing” data and aims to:

Take data created or collected for research studies and “grow” it in a structured way using modern best practices for storing data along with its metadata.

Context

Imagine you are a researcher collecting data on diabetes patients and their physical activity. You want to save and structure your data to ease the process of:

  1. adding more data to your dataset, when more has been collected, and

  2. analysing the data later on.

You have collected the data across two time periods (in 2023 and 2024), resulting in a longitudinal study of the same individuals, who tracked their exercise in March of 2023 and 2024.

You have two types of files with data:

  1. A patients file that describes the patients and includes their age, sex, height, weight, and diabetes type. The file is called patients.csv.
Showing the first two rows in the patients.csv file.
id age sex height weight diabetes_type
1 54 F 167.5  70.3 Type 1
2 66 M 175  80.5 Type 2
  1. Two physical_activity files that describe their physical activity patterns, such as when they did activities, what type of activity, and for how long. The files are called physical_activity_2023.csv and physical_activity_2024.csv.
Showing the first two rows in the physical_activity_2024.csv file.
id physical_activity duration date
1 run 10 01-03-2024
2 walk 25 02-04-2024

Since you want to grow your data in a structured way, you decide to try out Sprout for handling your data.

Tasks

We want you to do some tasks, that you’ll read about below. As you do it, we want you to tell us your inner dialogue and thought process on what you’re doing and what makes sense, doesn’t make sense, is confusing, or is something you like.

Throughout, we will refrain from explaining and helping you too much.

Note

An important aspect of user testing for you as the user is that there are no right or wrong answers. We are trying to learn how to build a better tool for you and others like you. So give honest, constructive feedback!

If something is unclear to you, it is a great oppurtunity for us to learn how to make it clearer going forward - this is exactly why user tests are so helpful for us!

The tasks we want you to do are:

  1. Download the files from the data repository.
  2. Open up the files on your computer and take a look at them, so you have a bit of an idea of what the data is.
  3. Using Sprout, create the metadata for the patients.csv file.
  4. Then create the metadata for physical_activity_2023.csv and call it physical_activity.
  5. Add the data from physical_activity_2024.csv to the physical_activity metadata.

Go through them one at the time and remember to verbally walk through your thoughts and reactions to us.

Thank you so much for your help and your time! ☺️