Rethinking UX for Sustainable Science Gateways: Orientations from Practice

2025-10-24

AI Summary

Scientific gateway sustainability faces persistent challenges, as current user experience (UX) practices are often narrowly confined to interface usability or late-stage evaluation. This paper reconceptualizes UX as a holistic, design-oriented perspective that transcends the interface layer to integrate infrastructure architecture, cross-functional team collaboration, and community co-creation. Drawing on in-depth interviews and expert consultations across 65+ scientific gateway projects—and grounded in user-centered design principles and systems thinking—we identify three distinct UX practice orientations: provisional, project-based, and strategic. We thereby propose the first UX analytical framework explicitly tailored to scientific gateway sustainability. Empirical findings demonstrate that strategic UX practices significantly enhance long-term maintainability and community adaptability. The framework offers both theoretical grounding and actionable pathways for advancing resilience in research cyberinfrastructure.

Technology Category

• Humans and AI: User Experience and Usability
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Web

Application Category

• User Modeling, Personalization and Recommendation: Practical large-scale studies of user experience
• Responsible Web: Consent frameworks and practices on the web
• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Interdisciplinary science discovery with web data mining

Abstract

As science gateways mature, sustainability has become a central concern for funders, developers, and institutions. Although user experience (UX) is increasingly acknowledged as vital, it is often approached narrowly--limited to interface usability or deferred until late in development. This paper argues that UX should be understood not as a discrete feature or evaluation stage but as a design-oriented perspective for reasoning about sustainability. Drawing on principles from user-centered design and systems thinking, this view recognizes that infrastructure, staffing, community engagement, and development timelines all shape how gateways are experienced and maintained over time. Based on an interview study and consulting experience with more than 65 gateway projects, the paper identifies three recurring orientations toward UX--ad hoc, project-based, and strategic--that characterize how teams engage with users and integrate design thinking into their workflows. These orientations are not a maturity model but a reflective lens for understanding how UX is positioned within gateway practice. Reframing UX as a structural dimension of sustainability highlights its role in building adaptable, community-aligned, and enduring scientific infrastructure.

Problem

• Rethinking UX as a design perspective for science gateway sustainability
• Identifying three UX orientations from practice to improve workflows
• Reframing UX as a structural dimension for enduring scientific infrastructure

Innovation

• UX as design-oriented sustainability perspective
• Three UX orientations from 65 gateway projects
• UX as structural dimension for enduring infrastructure