Open OnDemand Usability Survey Results

We reached out to everyone in February to complete a survey about the usability and administrative capabilities of Open OnDemand. This survey was made possible by the NSF funded Science Gateways Community Institute (SGCI), we thank them for conducting this survey and thank you to those who completed the survey and provided feedback. We appreciate your thoughtful responses and will be taking your feedback into consideration!

Based on your responses, here is what we’re going to be working on (ordered by popularity):

  1. Double click to open files in the File Browser. (https://github.com/OSC/ondemand/issues/438)

  2. We will be improving the copy and paste functionality for noVNC. (https://github.com/OSC/ondemand/issues/455)

  3. Improving the Job Composer so it is more accessible for novice users and so it’s easier to compile jobs that you may execute frequently.

  4. Git integration / Online IDE (https://github.com/OSC/ondemand/issues/457)

  5. We understand that a lot of our users access OOD through mobile tablets and mobile phones, we’re working on making our design mobile responsive.

  6. More interactive applications are coming to Open OnDemand.

  7. We understand that users would like more tutorials / inline documentation, we’re working on this! (https://github.com/OSC/ondemand/issues/456)

  8. Globus integration.

  9. Working on improving the dashboard to allow more user customization and to enable quicker access to tasks (such as VDI) that you frequently use OOD for.

Complete list of issues created from this survey:

GitHub Issue Description
#459 File Browser should have mass download and mass transfer (to another directory) function.
#458 Avoid opening a new browser for every main option-click
#457 Add VS Code Online as interactive application
#456 Users want more concrete tutorials and step-by-step instruction.
#455 noVNC copy and pasting into VDI applications
#454 PUN Web Server needs to be refreshed after some period of inactivity.
#453 The clipboard does not seem to work when using the terminal view.
#438 Add ability to double click on files to open / edit in Files application
#437 Show estimated start time for queued jobs
#436 Improve error messages in Files application
#379 Add "About this installation" page

We’re always looking for feedback to improve, anyone who has feedback on how we can improve Open OnDemand to make it easier for you and your users, please open up a GitHub Issue in the OSC/ondemand repository or open up a feature request here on Discourse.