Why User Experience is an Essential Component of Your Open Data Portal

This article is originally published on the Link Digital website.

When building open data portals, organizations often focus intensively on technical aspects: ensuring dataset quality, maintaining interoperability, and optimizing backend systems. However, one critical element frequently gets overlooked: user experience (UX).

Even with the highest quality data, poor UX can severely limit the discoverability, usability, and reusability of datasets. Organizations ignore this at their peril, regardless of their technical infrastructure.

Understanding User Experience in Data Portals

User experience design focuses on building products that help people complete their tasks easily, without frustration or unnecessary obstacles. For open data portals, this means enabling users to find, understand, download, and effectively use data.

Peter Morville's UX Honeycomb outlines seven principles for effective design: usefulness, desirability, accessibility, credibility, findability, usability, and value. These principles translate into essential questions during portal development: Does the product solve its intended problem? Is it easy to navigate? Can users find what they need? Is it accessible regardless of physical status, age, gender, or cultural background?

Balancing the audience needs

Open data portals face a unique challenge: serving both technical experts and general public users. Complexity isn't just necessary for government and research users—it's their second nature. They require advanced features like sophisticated filtering, API access, geospatial tools, and the ability to handle massive datasets.

The solution lies in finding balance. The Pacific Data Hub's Climate Change Flagship exemplifies this approach, providing technical information on complex topics like climate mitigation and adaptation while maintaining easy navigation and comprehension. Clear labeling, naming conventions, and visual data presentation are crucial. The site's interactive map enables users to quickly access country-specific data on Pacific climate projects. [PDH Climate Change Flagship]

Core UX Principles for Data Portals

Search and Discovery

Strong search functionality is vital since many users arrive looking for specific information. Smart filtering, advanced search capabilities, autocomplete suggestions, and word embeddings help users find relevant data even when using different terminology.

Dataset exploration

Once users locate datasets, they need immediate understanding of the contents. This requires clean metadata layouts, data previews, clear file format information, licensing details, and visual summaries through charts or maps when possible.

Downloads

The download process should be clear, fast, and flexible. Users need visible file format options, filtering capabilities, file size indicators, and estimated download times. Progress indicators and confirmation messages ensure users know downloads have started successfully.

Advanced Features

Many users remain unaware of powerful portal features. Effective UX design helps users discover capabilities like topic tracking with notifications for new data, dashboard creation, data visualization tools, map layer comparisons, and advanced publishing tools for large datasets.

Essential Design Considerations

Mobile Optimization

With increasing mobile portal access, interfaces must work effectively on smaller screens with clean layouts and readable text.

User Testing

Interactive prototype testing reveals how real people navigate interfaces, identifying confusing elements or difficult-to-find features. This feedback enables design refinement for smoother, more intuitive user journeys.

Collaboration Features

Modern portals should support user interaction through dataset discussions, feedback mechanisms, quality ratings, and correction suggestions. Some platforms enable shared pages or dashboards, requiring features like comments, version history, user roles, and notifications to build trust and create active, connected spaces.

The Path Forward

Effective UX design transforms open data portals from mere data repositories into dynamic platforms that genuinely serve their diverse user communities. By understanding user needs, reducing pain points, automating routine tasks, and balancing complexity with accessibility, organizations can maximize their data's impact and reach.

The investment in thoughtful UX design pays dividends in increased data usage, broader community engagement, and ultimately, greater success in achieving open data initiatives' fundamental goals: making valuable information accessible and actionable for all users.

Also see: How to tell stories with data using these CKAN extensions