User Engagement in Service Development: A Framework for Sustainable Research Data Services

Long-term sustainability of research data services depends strongly on an active and engaged user community. Understanding user needs early on and continuing to involve users as services mature helps ensure that solutions remain relevant across different scientific domains.Base4NFDI is a joint initiative of all 26 NFDI consortia to establish NFDI-wide basic services for FAIR research data management. The project currently coordinates eight basic services and supports their maturation into sustainable offerings, bringing together multiple scientific communities to build interoperable, cross-disciplinary infrastructure. As part of this work, we are developing a comprehensive framework to guide service development from initial concept through to mature service stages.Recognising the importance of users for sustainability and long-term operation of a RDM service, we have also developed a user engagement component to our framework, comprising all kinds of activities centered around the potential users of a basic service. With support from Base4NFDI staff, it helps our basic service teams in understanding their users through early-stage requirement analysis, identification of target audiences and persona workshops, formulation of user stories, the creation of training materials, documentation and more. Incubator projects further allow our basic services to be tested, adapted, and improved in collaboration with early adopters, ensuring alignment with real-world needs and fostering adoption across disciplines. Finally, we actively visit user communities, present the special features of the services, and actively contribute new integration possibilities to the services.We are publishing components of our framework openly and will continue to make further parts available. At our poster, we welcome dialogue with the RSE community to share experiences, gather feedback, and discuss practical challenges. For instance, user engagement requires dedicated resources and may not be feasible for every project, making the exchange of approaches especially valuable.