AI Task Force Policy Dashboard
A visual and interactive web app for student researchers and faculty conducting effective and responsible research using AI.
Project Details
DURATION
ROLE
TEAM
Sep. 2024 - Dec. 2024 (4 mo. total)
Design Strategist, UX Researcher, UI/UX
Heather Davies
Jason Huang
Wesley Wildman
Problem Statement
The AI Task Force at Boston University needed a way to track and manage research projects while ensuring compliance with ethical guidelines and institutional policies. The existing process was manual and time-consuming, leading to potential delays and inconsistencies in research oversight.
Goals
The primary objectives of this project were to streamline research management, ensure compliance, and enhance collaboration. We aimed to create a centralized platform for tracking research progress and managing documentation, implement a system to track and verify compliance with ethical guidelines and institutional policies, and facilitate communication between researchers, faculty advisors, and institutional review boards.
Research & Discovery
User Interviews
Conducted interviews with student researchers, faculty advisors, and institutional review board members to understand their needs, pain points, and workflows. Student researchers needed a way to track their progress and ensure compliance, faculty advisors wanted to monitor multiple projects and provide feedback, and institutional review boards needed a streamlined process for reviewing and approving research.
Competitive Analysis
Analyzed existing research management systems and identified opportunities for improvement in terms of usability, compliance tracking, and collaboration features. Existing systems were often complex and difficult to navigate, compliance tracking was typically manual and error-prone, and collaboration features were limited or non-existent.
User Personas
Student Researcher
Graduate student conducting AI research who needs to track progress and ensure compliance with ethical guidelines.
- Needs to track research progress
- Must ensure compliance with guidelines
- Wants to collaborate with advisors
Faculty Advisor
Professor overseeing multiple research projects who needs to monitor progress and provide guidance.
- Monitors multiple projects
- Provides feedback and guidance
- Ensures research quality
Review Board Member
Institutional review board member who needs to evaluate research proposals and ensure compliance.
- Reviews research proposals
- Ensures compliance with policies
- Provides approvals and feedback
Next Steps
Implementation
Work with developers to implement the dashboard, focusing on usability, compliance tracking, and collaboration features.
- Develop core functionality
- Implement compliance tracking
- Add collaboration features
Testing & Iteration
Conduct user testing with student researchers, faculty advisors, and review board members to gather feedback and make improvements.
- Test with real users
- Gather feedback
- Make improvements
Figure 1: Topic Model view of the final dashboard design
Dashboard View
The dashboard view provides a comprehensive overview of the research landscape, allowing users to explore semantic network interconnections between various research papers. This view helps researchers understand the relationships and patterns within their field of study.
Adder View
The adder view provides a streamlined interface for quickly accessing critical information about research papers and assessing their relevance to ongoing research. This view helps researchers efficiently evaluate and incorporate new sources into their work.
Figure 2: Synopsis Graph view of the final design
V3 — Motion and Animation
Learning about and utilizing animation was very compelling to me because although I had worked with visual design in the past, I'd never really had an opportunity to implement animation and motion in a design before. I knew I wanted my animations to supplement the welcoming nature of my dashboard, so it was crucial that my animations enhanced my UX, and didn't sabotage it.
Upon assessing my dashboard, there were a few animations I immediately sought to implement, and a few others that occurred to me as I worked through my next iteration. I knew that I wanted to have the user be able to scroll down the Recommendaton bar ; however, I had to make sure that the way I animated in XD actually made it feel like a scroll bar, and not just a dissolving mess downward. This meant that all of the comment panels had to stay in place and not warp as the user scrolled.
Another animation that proved successful was the ability to click on the Graph View toggle to select which graph was to be viewed: Semantic Network or Topic Analysis. For this animation, I used an easing-out dissolve of the darkened button to indicate that the button was essentially shifting to the next question.