Towards a project community approach to academic scientific software development

Academic scientific software development projects aim to provide valuable research tools to aid the scientific community in the process of discovery. The need for those tools to meet wider expectations of usability and good user experience design is critical to success; however the nature of academic e-science software development projects means they are often constrained by too narrow an understanding of the potential user base, and a focus on development at the expense of broad user research. We introduce the concept of the Project Community as a way of addressing these limitations in capacity to support effective “user research” that informs and influences longer-term marketing and outreach strategy as well as supporting the development of usable and useful scientific software.