Diagram of the initial Sid concept

Sid is the name for a new social science research platform designed to improve access to high-performance computing resources. I led UX design in collaboration with research computing service and development leads.

During my tenure the Sid project evolved from concepts for an internally-designed application to a live environment that used the Open On Demand open source infrastructure and finally to conceptual models for future development. Outcomes included:

• streamlined authentication, informative status messaging and pre-defined job quick start links

• components added OOD’s core open source code via a collaboration described in a short paper presented at PEARC23.

• adoption of Sid’s conceptual framework by Harvard Business School’s research computing organization their computing platform.

Research on this multi-year project included interviews with researchers across schools at Harvard including stakeholders from Harvard Business School, Faculty of Arts & Sciences and the School of Engineering and Sciences.

Work included:

• defining our user research and documentation practices

• research analysis and definition of users’ criteria for success

• UX, UI and identity direction

• defining and overseeing communication strategy for onboarding and support.