LUMEN D3.3: Co-Design of Services Report

This deliverable (D3.3) reports the outcomes of the co-design activities carried out under WP3 of the LUMEN project, presenting both the design of services and the initial interface decisions that emerged from this work. Although Tasks 3.3 (Co-design of Services and Visualisations) and 3.4 (Co-design of LLM/AI–Human Interaction) were conducted in parallel and shared a common methodological framework, this document focuses specifically on the nine workshops not directly related to LLM and AI–human interaction; the latter will be reported in the dedicated deliverable D3.4 (M19, July 2026).

The co-design activities documented in D3.3 and D3.4 build on the functional requirements identified through an initial round of user interviews, the results of which are fully detailed in D3.1 - User Needs and Personas Report (delivered in June 2025) (De Paoli, Morrow, Fletcher, homo, et al., 2025). That preliminary phase yielded 11 user personas, 11 usage scenarios, and a set of 19 design functionalities, which served as the foundation for the subsequent co-design process.
Between October 2025 and January 2026, twelve two-hour co-design workshops and four one-to-one sessions were held across T3.3 and T3.4, involving a total of 55 participants. These included researchers from the four LUMEN scientific domains — Molecular Dynamics, Mathematics, Earth Systems, and Social Sciences and Humanities — drawn from a wide range of European countries, as well as 15 participants specifically engaged in 3 co-design workshops for the LLM/AI-Human interaction reported in Deliverable D3.4. The 40 participants directly involved in the activities (9 workshops) reported in this deliverable are a subset of this broader group and are related to T3.3 only. 

Recruitment was coordinated by Abertay University in close cooperation with all consortium partners and WP8, and was structured into four progressive waves designed to align engagement with the interface prototyping activities led by Net7. Ethics and data-handling procedures were applied consistently throughout, ensuring informed consent and the secure management of recordings and participant data.

The workshops adopted a Human-Centred and User-Centred Design approach, leveraging design thinking, participatory tools, such as user stories and views, actions & functions mapping, the MoSCoW prioritisation framework, and the "How Might We?" technique. This approach allowed participants to act as co-designers, surfacing not only functional needs but also disciplinary specificities, expectations regarding interoperability, and concerns related to privacy, transparency, and trust.

The nine workshops, and one-to-one sessions covered by T3.3 encompassed the following service areas:

● visualisation and data representation;
● recommendation and personalisation;
● interdisciplinary resource discovery;
● advanced search and filtering;
● user profile management;
● software tools catalogue;
● educational resources and training modules;
● data quality, and metadata management;
● data integration and interoperability (one-to-one sessions).

Building on these findings, Net7 has translated the consolidated user needs into the fi rst concrete UX/UI directions for the LUMEN White-label Discovery Platform (WLDP), conceived as an evolution of the existing GoTriple1 platform and aligned with the European Accessibility Act and WCAG 2.1. The initial design decisions include:

● a redesigned visual language for charts together with four new advanced visualisations (zoomable force-directed network, drill-down tree map, stacked columns, heat map);
● profile-based recommendations to support networking;
● a "From the LUMEN Datamesh" area to expose cross-domain semantic relationships;
● targeted usability improvements to the search and filtering interface;
● a streamlined profile management experience including OAuth integration with ORCID and SWHID and a "Follow for updates" feature;
● an entry point for training and guides; a metadata issue–reporting mechanism to bridge the WLDP's role as aggregator with users' transparency expectations;
● a coherent LUMEN design system as the default look and feel of the platform.

Overall, the deliverable demonstrates how systematic engagement with domain users has produced a robust, multidisciplinary evidence base that is now actively shaping the early prototypes of the LUMEN ecosystem and ensuring that its services are firmly grounded in real research practices.

This deliverable is currently under review by the EC.