Insights into the user experience of the European Data Portal
Publication Date/Time
2020-08-28T12:30:00+00:00
Country
Europe
The European Data Portal conducted a research among users to gain
insights into the user experience of the portal and determine areas
for improvement
The European Data Portal (EDP) recently conducted a user satisfaction
survey and round of interviews to learn more about the user experience
of the portal. The aim of the research was to gain insights into
users’ needs and wishes of the portal to determine areas of
improvement. In total, 16 users with varying backgrounds from
different European countries participated.

_Survey responses_

In the survey, users were asked to answer questions on 5 different
user experience-related topics: awareness and interest, content
satisfaction, experience, smart functions and engagement. For every
topic, some observations were made:

 	* AWARENESS AND INTEREST: The EDP users come from various
backgrounds with different levels of open data awareness and maturity.
For example, the way they first found out about the portal vary and
include an internet search, via other national data portals and
word-of-mouth.
 	* CONTENT SATISFACTION: In terms of satisfaction of the content
variety, EDP scored an average of 5.9 out of 10. For content depth,
the portal scored an average of 6.1. Respondents find content
interesting and relevant. Suggestions are to link the articles with
supporting relevant reports, datasets and trainings, and produce more
editorial content that showcases the potential of open data in Europe.
Moreover, users want more clarity on the portal’s value proposition
and to understand the dependencies that EDP has to the national data
portals.
 	* EXPERIENCE: The portal’s visual design and navigation bar
received a relatively high score. However, the findability of
editorial content offers room for improvement.  EDP users experience
many online platforms in their everyday life, hence, the expectations
from the EDP are high. Therefore, the portal’s user experience
should look for ways to at least stay on par to the other mainstream
services.
 	* SMART FUNCTIONS: Everyone that responded to the survey uses the
search functions of the portal. From their suggested improvements, we
can conclude that the EDP needs to become more intuitive for its users
when searching for content with more embedded visualisations.
 	* ENGAGEMENT: Most respondents follow the EDP on social media. The
two preferred social media channels are Twitter and LinkedIn. This is
also confirmed by analytics conducted by the EDP team, including a
sentiment analysis of the engagement levels on social media platforms.
The results of these analyses show a steady growth of followers on
both channels, as shown in Figure 1 and 2 below, and that Twitter is
the EDP’s current most engaging platform with over a 1.2 million
reach with the community. In the research and sentiment analysis,
Facebook and Instagram showed low levels of engagement. Going forward,
the EDP needs to reconsider how to interact with their users and how
effort can be best spent promoting the service across the available
channels.

_Figure 1: EDP Twitter growth January 2019 - August 2020_

 

_Figure 2: EDP LinkedIn growth January 2019 - August 2020_

 

_Interview responses_

In addition to the survey, the EDP team also conducted interviews to
gain more insights into the user experience of the portal. The users
came from different professional occupations, e.g. a Member State open
data lead, a research associate, a UX consultant, a start-up
co-founder, and a cloud and data engineer. Based on the results from
the survey and the conducted interviews, 5 areas of improvement were
determined:

 	* VALUE PROPOSITION: Although the EDP already has a large amount of
content, it is not always clear what users can do or find on the
portal.
 	* DATASETS: Users seek guidance to quickly find data they are
looking for and want to be informed about datasets that might be
interesting for them. There is, incorrectly, a perceived lack of
hierarchy, clear categorisation and opportunities to provide feedback,
which suggests that the respective features are not clearly accessible
or communicated. The outcome is that users feel that it difficult to
find their way around the portal.
 	* EDITORIAL PART: Editorial content is key in engaging with the
community and offers great potential. Users from different skills
levels on open data and different backgrounds are interested in
different type of content (civil servants vs. researchers, or expert
users vs. beginners) and the portal should cater for those different
profiles accordingly.
 	* STATISTICS AND VISUALISATIONS: For non-expert users, visualisation
tools are perceived to be very important to understand data.
 	* EXPERIENCE AND INTERACTION: Users prefer a two-way stream of
communication on the portal (with functionalities such as rating
datasets, commenting on articles, sharing etc.) that are similar to
their other online experiences.

 

Overall, users appreciate the services offered by the EDP and will
continue to use the portal on a regular basis. However, there is
always room for improvement and the EDP team is very thankful for the
constructive feedback provided by the respondents. The team
responsible for EDP will focus on improving the services and embedding
the feedback in the coming months. For additional information on
responses, explore the EDP’s slide deck
[/sites/default/files/edp_user-analysis.pdf] that summarises users’
responses.

For more information or examples on open data, explore the European
Data Portal’s (EDP) news archive
[/en/news-events/news] and featured highlight section
[/en/news-events/news?type=highlights]. Aware of open data examples or
stories?  Share them with us via mail [/en/feedback/form?type=4],
and follow up on Twitter
[https://twitter.com/EU_DataPortal], Facebook
[http://www.facebook.com/EuropeanDataPortal] or LinkedIn
[https://www.linkedin.com/company/10478056/] to stay up to date!
