Cycle 5: Astropy UX User Interviews

finance/proposal-calls/cycle5/tollerud-user-interviews.md

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+### Title
+Astropy UX User Interviews
+
+### Project Team
+Erik Tollerud will lead the project, Jenn Kotler will do most of the interview development and results summary (and is who all of the funding would go to).  If she cannot be funded for logistical/financial reasons, another UX specialist at an astronomy institution, university, or archive will be hired for this project.
+
+### Project Description / Scope of Work
+Any software project depends on understanding how it meets the needs of the user community, and Astropy is no exception.  The already-existing effort for Astropy user surveys have provided broad and useful inputs on how our community makes use of Astropy. However, surveys always have baked within them systematic response-related effects - i.e., the person with time to answer the survey is likely a biased set relative to "all possible users". This proposal aims to address this by interviewing astronomy-focused users of Astropy and determining 1) their workflows and how Astropy fits into them, 2) whether this group has different perspectives than the user survey results, and 3) Where they can contribute and what barriers may or may not exist for them to do so.
+
+The core idea is to work with a UX expert who has experience with and expertise in understanding how to find out what users do with their tools.  That expert will develop a (remote, but synchronous) interview protocol and give it to ~10 astronomer-users of Astropy.  They will then summarize the findings both on their own and relative to the broader user survey, and share this openly with the community at an Astropy coordination meeting and via a document similar to that done for other user surveys.
+
+#### Roadmap Items
+* "Better understand Astropy user community through user and developer surveys" - while not strictly a survey, this project is essentially a very in-depth focused version on deeper dives into the same topics the surveys seek to answer.
+* "Ensure people who contribute are from a broad experience base, including typical astronomers."  - this project aims specifically at get perspectives from an experience base of astronomers. (Whether it leads to longer-term contribution than just the responses is unclear, but part of the goal is to try to achieve exactly that.)
+
+#### Project / Work / Deliverables
+The specific deliverables for this project are:
+
+1. An interview script focused on (but not necessarily exclusive to) Astropy users and the 3 goals outlined in the Scope of Work, to be used in this project but also available for others to use outside of the timeframe and results scope of this FR project.
+2. The script will be used to interview roughly 10 astronomers, with effort made to get interviews with a reasonable geographic and demographic spread over the Astropy user community.
+3. The outcomes of these interviews will be summarized and compared to the most recent user surveys, and the resulting write-up will be made public to drive discussions about the roadmap or other prioritization efforts in future coordination meetings.
+
+### Approximate Budget
+Currency: US $
+
+The budget here assumes all interviews will be remote and hence not require travel funding.  It is possible the project will be facilitated by travel to a conference (e.g. EAS annual meeting, winter AAS, etc), but this will not be accounted in this budget as it would be a separate and specific travel request only after enough interview candidates are identified. The budget also assumes contractor rates, which may or may not be possible due to contractual limitations on possible UX staff at various astronomical institutes. But for fair comparison with other FRs this ignores that and instead assumes all work will be as a regular NumFOCUS contractor.
+
+* Preparation of the interview protocol and script: 10 hr
+* Conducting 10 interviews of 1 hr each: 10 hr
+* Collating and summarizing results: 10 hr
+
+At a rate of $120/hr, this yields:
+
+- TOTAL: $3,600
+
+### Period of Performance
+
+Jan 1, 2026–Dec 31, 2026. While the above schedule is not a full year of work, the need to schedule interviews with geographically disparate astronomers means we may need a lot of flexibility in the length of the interview stage to recruit and interview people.