User Engagement

Understanding and engaging with users is essential for developing research infrastructure, tools, and services that truly serve the scientific community. User engagement helps ensure that what we build is useful, usable, and addresses real needs.

Why User Engagement Matters

When developing tools or services without user input, we risk:

• Building features nobody needs
• Missing critical use cases
• Creating interfaces that are difficult to use
• Wasting resources on the wrong priorities

User engagement helps us:

• Understand actual user needs and workflows
• Identify pain points and opportunities
• Validate assumptions before investing heavily
• Build trust and adoption within the community
• Co-create solutions that work in practice

Design Thinking Approach

Design Thinking offers powerful tools and techniques for exploring what users need, how to engage them, and how to consider them throughout development and service delivery.

What is Design Thinking?

Design Thinking is a human-centered approach to innovation that puts users at the center of the process. It’s iterative, collaborative, and emphasizes:

• Empathy: Understanding users deeply
• Definition: Framing the right problems to solve
• Ideation: Generating diverse solutions
• Prototyping: Making ideas tangible quickly
• Testing: Learning from real feedback

The Design Thinking Process

Practical Resources

Stanford d.school

Stanford d.school Resources

Comprehensive collection of design thinking tools, methods, and case studies. Particularly useful:

• Design thinking bootleg (quick reference guide)
• Method cards for each phase
• Facilitator guides for workshops

IDEO Design Kit

IDEO Design Kit

Free toolkit with:

• Step-by-step methods
• Case studies from diverse contexts
• Downloadable workbooks
• Video tutorials

Especially relevant for social impact and community-centered design.

User Engagement in EBRAINS Context

Identifying Your Users

For EBRAINS tools and services, users might include:

• Researchers: Neuroscientists, computational scientists, clinicians
• Developers: Software engineers, data scientists
• Students: Graduate students, postdocs
• Educators: Instructors using EBRAINS for teaching
• Infrastructure operators: National Node staff, system administrators

Different user groups have different needs—make sure you’re engaging the right people for your specific tool or service.

Levels of Engagement

Inform: Share information about what you’re building

• Newsletters, blog posts, presentations
• Documentation and tutorials
• Demos and showcases

Consult: Gather input from users

• Surveys and questionnaires
• Focus groups
• User interviews
• Feedback forms

Involve: Engage users in the design process

• Co-design workshops
• Participatory design sessions
• Advisory groups
• Beta testing programs

Collaborate: Partner with users as equals

• Joint development teams
• User-led feature development
• Community contributions

Empower: Users drive the process

• Open source communities
• User-generated content
• Self-service platforms

Choose the level appropriate to your context, resources, and goals.

Practical Tips for EBRAINS Teams

Start Small

You don’t need elaborate processes to begin:

• Talk to 3-5 users about their workflows
• Sketch a quick prototype and get feedback
• Run a simple usability test
• Every bit of user input is better than none

Make It Regular

Don’t treat user engagement as a one-time event:

• Schedule regular user feedback sessions
• Include users in sprint reviews
• Create feedback channels (forums, chat, forms)
• Track and respond to user-reported issues

Be Inclusive

Ensure your user engagement includes diverse perspectives:

• Different career stages
• Various disciplines
• Multiple institutions and countries
• Different technical skill levels
• Diverse backgrounds (gender, culture, ability)

See Inclusion and Diversity for more guidance.

Close the Loop

Always let users know how their input was used:

• Share what you learned
• Explain what you changed (or why you didn’t)
• Show the impact of their contribution
• Thank them for their time

This builds trust and encourages ongoing engagement.

Examples in Practice

Tool Development

When building a new analysis tool:

1. Empathize: Interview researchers about their current analysis workflows
2. Define: Identify the most time-consuming and error-prone steps
3. Ideate: Brainstorm ways to automate or simplify those steps
4. Prototype: Build a minimal working version
5. Test: Have users try it with their real data, observe and learn

Service Improvement

When improving an existing service:

1. Empathize: Analyze support tickets and user complaints
2. Define: Map the user journey, identify pain points
3. Ideate: Generate solutions for the top 3 pain points
4. Prototype: Implement small changes quickly
5. Test: Measure impact, iterate

Documentation

When creating documentation:

1. Empathize: Watch users try to use your tool without help
2. Define: Identify where they get stuck
3. Ideate: Different ways to explain or show those concepts
4. Prototype: Draft documentation sections
5. Test: Have new users follow the docs, observe where they struggle

Measuring Success

How do you know if your user engagement is effective?

Quantitative Metrics

• User adoption rates
• Task completion rates
• Time to complete tasks
• Support ticket volume
• User retention

Qualitative Indicators

• User satisfaction (surveys, interviews)
• Unsolicited positive feedback
• Community contributions
• User stories and testimonials
• Reduced confusion or errors

Engagement Metrics

• Number of users participating in feedback
• Diversity of user voices heard
• Frequency of user contact
• Response rate to surveys

Common Pitfalls to Avoid

Engaging users too late: Don’t wait until you’ve built everything to ask for feedback.

Sampling bias: Don’t only talk to power users or people who already like your tool.

Ignoring negative feedback: Critical feedback is often the most valuable.

Not acting on feedback: If you consistently ignore user input, they’ll stop providing it.

Over-engineering: Don’t build elaborate solutions before validating the core need.

Treating users as testers only: Users are partners in design, not just quality assurance.

Getting Started

Quick Win (1 hour)

1. Identify 3-5 users of a tool or service you’re involved with
2. Contact them and ask for a 15-minute conversation
3. Ask them:
   • What are you trying to accomplish?
   • What works well?
   • What’s frustrating?
   • If you had a magic wand, what would you change?
4. Synthesize themes and share with your team
5. Pick one quick improvement to implement

Ongoing Practice (ongoing)

1. Schedule monthly user feedback sessions
2. Include user stories in sprint planning
3. Create a feedback channel (e.g., Rocket Chat, Forms)
4. Analyze usage data and support tickets monthly
5. Share learnings with the broader EBRAINS community

Related Resources

• EBRAINS Forms — Collect user feedback
• EBRAINS Chat — Engage with community
• Building Shared Understanding — Working across disciplines
• Education and Training — User training and onboarding

Contributing

If you have examples of successful user engagement at EBRAINS, or tools and templates to share, contact support@ebrains.eu with the subject line “User Engagement”.