This page is the draft of the proposal to send to JISC - Alun and Mustie, feel free to edit and expand or criticise. This is really urgent now, though!

Suggested Title: Access Management and Future Grid Users: overcoming the tech barrier

Introduction

We propose a study involving the interviewing of scientific and humanities researchers who are potential, incipient and established grid users. Firstly, by observation, we wish to establish whether any existing or future (yet to be developed) grid resource or service would benefit them in their research; this may be to enable their current style of working to be easier or quicker, or it may be to enable greater collaboration or interdisciplinary working.

For those users who are either currently working with grids or who agree that future use of the grid may be beneficial, we would like to explore further to examine the following hypotheses:

1. If a grid interface or the working environment is (apparently) too difficult to use, it will not be adopted by many of the rightful users.

2. Most scientists and humanities researchers will be Service End Users (as defined in [attachment:AllHandsPapers2006/AllHands06TypesUsers.pdf Norman, 2006]).

   • 2b. Currently grids are serving Power Users (as defined in [attachment:AllHandsPapers2006/AllHands06TypesUsers.pdf Norman, 2006]) and do not yet benefit non-computer-technical researchers.FootNote([attachment:AllHandsPapers2006/AllHands06TypesUsers.pdf Norman (2006)] Types of grid users and the Customer-Service Provider relationship: a future picture of grid use, paper accepted for the UK e-Science All Hands Meeting, September 2006.)

We also intend to examine the categorisation of users, as proposed by the ESP-GRID project, into the following groupings:

• Service End User (Data), Service End User (eXecutables), Power User Agnostic of grid node used, Power User requiring Specific grid node, Power User Developing a Service (known as SEUD, SEUX, PUA, PUS, PUDS respectively).

We need to establish whether these groupings are appropriate. Note that we these divisions do not take into account the kinds of grid jobs that result from their activity. This may, however, be another valuable approach. Nevertheless, we believe that the above five divisions - a subset of the seven that we proposed in [attachment:AllHandsPapers2006/AllHands06TypesUsers.pdf Norman, 2006] - are worthy of use in a study such as this.

Hypothesis one has been found to be difficult to investigate within the existing literature, as studies have focussed on the loss of productivity resulting from the imposition of difficult to use software.FootNote(For example, see Dutton, W.H. (1999), Society on the Line, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK) xxxxMustie - have you got anything better for this point?) There seems to be little work undertaken on the consequences of poor usability where a researcher's free choice allows him/her to choose not to employ the new software or 'system' at all and either use an alternative or indeed not to pursue that kind of work at all. It will be beneficial to establish the principle that - at least in the academic environment - despite the great potential benefits, users may not adopt the newer, more powerful methods if their initial experience is that "it is too difficult".

Hypotheses 2a, 2b and the (third) aim cited above are all directed at examining the types of future users. If such a principle can be shown to be true then the knowledge that the majority of future users will be Service End Users should aid the thinking for the design of access management systems for the future.

Communities of users

We intend to interview users from as broad a range of disciplines as possible. As a starting point we will attempt to look at the requirements work (and follow ups) for researchers engaged in the [http://www.integrativebiology.ac.uk/ Integrative Biology (IB)] and the [http://bvreh.humanities.ox.ac.uk/ Building a Virtual Research Environment for the Humanities (BVREH)] projects, both of which are at led by