BioMate
Lab-bench biologists find it difficult to use many existing tools for their data analysis. These tools are generally command-line computer programs written by computational biologists. Computational biologists do not have time to create user-friendly interfaces for their programs, and often find themselves spending a lot of time helping lab-bench biologists run their programs. This creates a burden for all involved: lab-bench biologists cannot move forward with their data analysis, and computational biologists cannot move forward with their research.
Click on a page above for a specific section.
Design
Our final design focused on simplicity and learnability for lab-bench biologists and learnability and efficiency for computational biologists. One major design decision was whether to make two separate interfaces for the two user groups or to make a common interface for both. We decided to design a common interface because, the roles of our two user groups are not totally isolated and overlap in a number of tasks. We tried to make the most common task of a lab-bench biologist which is generating the command for using a script, simple, intuitive and learnable. On the other hand, we tried to design the task of creating or editing a script to be as efficient as possible since the computational biologists are efficient users of computers. We incorporated support for both keyboard and mouse actions throughout our interface (e.g. tabbing through fields, click vs enter etc.).
On the login page, we wanted to make the actions “Sign in” and “Create an account” more visible, so we used big blue buttons for them. We tried to make the placement of these buttons externally consistent with popular web applications like gmail. |
|
The design of our landing page went through a number of revisions. The design considerations were - what actions to put in the action wheel, how the actions should be placed, how to remove ambiguity from the names of the actions, whether the labels of the actions should be hidden or displayed, what icons to use etc.
|
|
|
|
|
|
When user presses the “Generate Command” button, an overlay is shown with the generated command. The user can save the generated command to his notes by hitting the “Save to Notes” button. |
|
Note for a particular script is displayed in an editable textbox as an overlay. The user can edit inline and save right away. |
|
Clicking on “Save Parameters” asks the user to provide a name for the configuration so that, he can load this configuration later. An alternative design may have been akin to how ms word works, in which a user would view all their save files for the script in |
|
Clickng "Load Parameters" allowed the user to select a previously saved parameter configuration. Note that saves within the last minute are displayed with the words "Just now", which we felt was more informative than just listing the time. |
|
On the homepage, clicking on “My Notes” shows the user an overlay with a scrollable list with all his notes. Recently accessed notes appear on the top of the list. We also show the names of the script owners so that no ambiguity arises when two different owners have scripts with same name. The choice of overlay seemed more appropriate because it avoids unnecessary page switching. |
|
Clicking on the “History” button on the homepage shows the user an overlay with a scrollable list of his ten most recently accessed scripts. If the user is also the owner of the script, then both “Edit” and “Use Script” options for that script is available in the list. The choice of overlay seemed more appropriate because it avoids unnecessary page switching. |