Synthesize & Summarize Research

[ultrasaurus]

There has been A LOT of research over the last 6 months that is scattered across many, many google docs. This story is to publish info on the wiki that will be a helpful input to design and future efforts.

[meiqimichelle]

Whew! All the research.

I've created a homepage for the wiki and added links to a draft problem statement and hypotheses that are drawn from the many pages of related research. The research itself I've summarized (and copied where appropriate) into a new research branch in this repo here.

As is probably no surprise, the research overlaps, so I want to let this sit for a day and then take another look. I'm sure it can be organized in a clearer way after my brain has had a chance to step back from the ven diagram. One of the biggest problems right now is that some of the hypotheses are more feature-level, and others are broader, and I didn't quite pull over all the feature-level work from all of the research yet. Getting there.

In short (unless there's research I haven't seen), we know much more about our internal users and use cases than we do about our external users and use cases. This makes decisions targeted towards our external users much riskier than decisions targeted towards our internal users. It also means that any user stories we create about external users should be treated with extreme caution until we can talk to more people.

Since this is the case, I recommend prioritizing getting Ethnio up and running on the current dashboard and site so we can get some volunteers to talk to us about why they're on the site and what they came to the dashboard to find. Is this a @gboone thing? I can organize Ethnio but I don't know how to get a blessing to put it on the live site. I added #347 for this.

Also, we need to reserve whole-team time to clean up those hypotheses to get team consensus on the outcomes we're shooting for with our work. I am happy to host that process. Getting those hypotheses (and their associated metrics) settled will let us focus on what to build/test/research next. I added #348 for this.

And finally, any documentation about the 18F.gsa.gov outreach and communications strategy in general that can inform how the dashboard might fit into the big picture for external audiences would be super helpful.

[andrewmaier]

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