Co-designing user stories for geodata applications to support climate action in 5 GEO Societal Benefit Areas

To support climate change adaptation and mitigation measures of the Paris Agreement and Glasgow follow-up, practitioners co-designing measures within their community of practice require geodata to support decision making. Geodata has the qualities of being current and local, but is not always easily accessible. Climate applications, like climate services, can increase accessibility and ensure that data is ready-to-use, hence bridging the gap between geodata and practitioners. Such applications should meet the needs of a range of potential users, and it is therefore important for practitioners to be involved in their development. One way of ensuring adequate involvement is through participatory sessions where practitioners and developers co-create ‘user stories’ as means to identify requirements for the applications. This approach is by no means novel; user centric design has been applied in the development process of a wide range of applications. Nevertheless, it is worthwhile to investigate how user stories can be developed in such a way that they are of high quality and therefore useful as input for application development. Given the increased need for climate services such as climate change applications, this question is particularly important for applications that support climate action.

This empirical study addresses the information gap faced by geo data application developers concerning user needs. Through a series of participatory workshops with practitioners and developers, data on user-formulated needs covering a wide range of user types and Earth Observation application domains was collected. This concerns user stories that were co-created as input for the development of a range of decision support applications for the H2020 EIFFEL project. The aim of EIFFEL is to offer the Earth Observation community the capacity to exploit existing GEOSS datasets in order to support decision-making for climate change mitigation and adaptation. Central to the project are the development and uptake of 5 pilot applications on Climate Change adaptation and mitigation measures. The EIFFEL pilots cover the following GEO Societal Benefit Areas (SBAs): (1) water and land use management, (2) sustainable agriculture, (3) transport management, (4) sustainable urban development, and (5) disaster resilience.

By identifying the needs of practitioners, it is possible for developers to develop useful applications that are tailored to said needs. The online participatory workshops resulted in relevant data with regards to these needs. During these workshops, participants were invited to co-create user stories for the applications by identifying (1) the user, (2) climate change challenges faced, (3) goals, and (4) core tasks for every story. This data was interpreted by the researchers and subjected to further review in order to develop fully-fledged user stories for each pilot application. This process resulted in a total of 18 user stories for all pilot applications, with around 4 stories per SBA. Knowledge gaps to be addressed are on how this approach to user story creation helps to co-design climate applications that prove to enhance the access to and practical use of climate-relevant geodata. After all, the purpose of climate services is to make relevant climate information accessible to the user.