Instructions for user tests of Sprout
🚧 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:
adding more data to your dataset, when more has been collected, and
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:
- A
patients
file that describes the patients and includes their age, sex, height, weight, and diabetes type. The file is calledpatients.csv
.
id | age | sex | height | weight | diabetes_type |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1 | 54 | F | 167.5 | 70.3 | Type 1 |
2 | 66 | M | 175 | 80.5 | Type 2 |
- 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 calledphysical_activity_2023.csv
andphysical_activity_2024.csv
.
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.
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:
- Download the files from the data repository.
- 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.
- Using Sprout, create the metadata for the
patients.csv
file. - Then create the metadata for
physical_activity_2023.csv
and call itphysical_activity
. - Add the data from
physical_activity_2024.csv
to thephysical_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! ☺️