MaNIS Interface Project
Assignment #1 - Project Proposal
Contents
Problem Statement
The MaNIS application (Mammal Networked Information System) is a network of distributed databases of mammal specimen data. The project is a collaboration between 17 research institutions and natural history museums, funded by the National Science Foundation. MaNIS makes information available for nearly a million museum specimens. This information can be used to enhance conservation and research initiatives, both locally and globally. The back-end has been developed, collaborations are in place, and an initial interface exists.
The project goal is to perform a comprehensive usability assessment of the current MaNIS search interface and propose enhancements that will be considered for implementation by the MaNIS development team. These enhancements might also have an impact on other museum database query tools whose interfaces will be patterned after the MaNIS interface.
Primary Users and Goals
The primary users of MaNIS are:
MaNIS replaces the need to contact a museumÕs curator or collection manager for many types of queries. Instead, users can run queries on a collections database. MaNIS allows users to access several relevant databases in a single query, refine their questions, and focus their inquiries to museum curators on significant requests such as specimen loans.
Additional Users
Because of the convenience provided by this online access to museum databases, other parties with interest in related fields, such as undergraduates, journalists, environmental researchers, and amateur naturalists among the general public, might also find MaNIS useful. Rather than identifying candidate specimens for inter-museum loans, these users will be interested in summary information about species and specific locations.
Also, other projects that use this interface as a model for searching networked distributed collections databases might have a broader user audience than MaNIS.
Participants (10)
Potential participants are curators and scientists from the UC Berkeley Museum of Vertebrate Zoology and the California Academy in Golden Gate Park. The lead implementer of the MaNIS project will help recommend candidate participants.
Suggestions and Rationale for Improvements
The current search interface is feature-rich and provides the experienced MaNIS user with a great deal of control. We propose to identify improvements that will support the use of the interface by infrequent or less-sophisticated primary users by reducing the need for prior knowledge of computers, the MaNIS project, and the mammal collections domain.
Some Examples of Areas to Address
- Form Layout and Flow
Some sections of forms retain information from past queries that is irrelevant to current queries. - Organization of Lists and Collections
Some dropdown lists are presented in random order, which makes selecting more difficult. - Selection and Navigation Options
In some sections, additional selection options are not immediately obvious to the user. - Terminology
Terminology from computer science is often used instead of terminology commonly used by curators and scientists. - Free-form Text Specification
In situations where the user types in text, query result sets can differ if a termÕs abbreviation is used instead of spelling it out, even if the abbreviation is widely accepted. No support is provided for misspellings or selecting from a known list of possibilities. - Browsing
There is currently no way to browse the information. - Scientific Knowledge Required
The system requires users to know exact scientific terms to formulate their queries, such as the family or genus name. If the system is intended to be useful to the general public, more terminology cues are needed. - Search Results
Search results are displayed in a plain text table. This project could investigate better ways of displaying the results in a graphical form. A preview of the size of the search result could be provided.