IS213 Projects Home

Assignment 1

• Problem Statement
• Project Members

Assignment 2

• Personas
• Task Analysis
• Appendices
• Work Distribution

Assignment 3

• Scenarios
• Comparative Analyses
• Initial Design 1
• Initial Design 2
• Initial Design 3
• Work Distribution

Assignment 4

• Introduction
• Low-Fi Prototype
• Methods
• Test Measures
• Results
• Discussion
• Appendices
• Work Distribution

Assignment 5

• Design Revisions
• Revised Scenarios
• 1st Hi-Fi Prototype
• Storyboards
• Instructions for Use
• Slide Presentation
• Work Distribution

Assignment 6

• Heuristic Evaluation
• Work Distribution

Assignment 7

• 2nd Hi-Fi Prototype
• Responses to HEs
• Work Distribution
• Instructions for Use

Assignment 8

• Introduction
• Method
• Test Measures
• Results
• Discussion
• Appendices
• Work Distribution
• Slide Presentation

Final Write-up

• Problem Statement
• Solution Overview
• Final Personas
• Final Scenarios
• Revised Storyboards
• Final Interface Design
• Design Evolution
• Interactive Prototype
• Instructions for Use
• Work Distribution
• Slide Presentation

Differences From Paper Prototype

New method of comparing and transferring annotations from other genes

LOFI UPDATE ANNOTATION SCREENSHOT

The pre-fill drop-down menu was surprisingly the most controversial aspect of our initial design. As you can see in the Lofi Update Annotation Screenshot above, we originally thought to have a drop-down menu near the start of this screen which would provide a list of best-matched homologues. Upon selecting such a list, the information from that homologue would be used to automatically pre-fill the rest of the annotation information, although users would still be able to edit and tweak these values.

Users were, in general, extremely wary of this functionality. They cited issues such as annotation errors propagating quickly throughout the system, or the problem of what to do if one discovers a gene has been annotated incorrectly after it has already been used to propagate data through mutliple other genes. It seemed that this option made the task of annotating a little too easy. Participants wanted a system that would require more deliberation on the part of the scientist.

To this end, we implemented the following drop-down box.

This window, which will appear in the "Modify Annotations" page, will allow users to select related genes of interest, and use multiple comparison tools to get an overview of the related annotations. Once users click "compare selected", all the annotation fields will appear in rows and all the selected genes will appear in columns, and the user will be able to select the value that is approrpriate for the currente gene (or enter a new one entirely).

No drafts

As you can see in the bottom right-hand corner of the image above, the paper prototype allowed participants to save draft versions of annotations, which would be accessible on their MyAnnotations page, for later submission. After testing, we realized that this draft would generate synchronization problems if another user wanted to modify the annotation while the first user was still working on a draft. Our solution was to cut the "draft" functionality entirely.

Applications such as Wikipedia handle this problem with an "edit conflict" dialogue box provided to the second user, who is responsible for manually merging conflicting versions. This makes sense for such large chunks of textual information that is constantly undergoing revision and improvement, but is less applicable to the small, specific set of data fields which make up a given annotation. Such an "edit conflict" might be useful for handling complex, ongoing discussions, but we anticipate that the vast majority of genes will enjoy no more than a handful of modifications. This assumption will be tested in future evaluations.

Additional evidence fields (PFam and UniProt)

Another participant suggested additional evidence fields for PFam and UniProt. These were added to the Evidence section of the Lofi Update Annotations Screenshot above, as shown in the Hifi Update Annotations Evidence Screenshot below.

HIFI Update Annotation Evidence Screenshot

Automatic previews (can be turned off in prefs)

In order to decrease the clutter of buttons seen in the "Update Annotation Screenshot" shown above, and also because none of the first-time users submitted their annotations without previews, we decided to remove the "preview" button and to make previewing automatic upon submission. There will be a checkbox so that power users can opt out of this automatic preview option.

Voting buttons on gene cart page

There are two points of entry to our system: the gene cart and the gene details page. Previously we only implemented the voting system ("I Agree" or "I Disagree" to particular annotations) on the gene details page, but users indicated a great enough confidence with their gene cart genes that they preferred to have these options available in the gene cart. Hence, the Gene Cart Snapshot above ends up looking like the Hifi Gene Cart Snapshot below.

HIFI GENE CART SNAPSHOT

Hyperlinks in discussions

Participants wanted embedded hyperlinks within the discussion page, so that they could provide external resources. This is an easy fix.

Flags to indicate genes recently annotated

One participant suggested flagging genes in the gene list that had been recently annotated in order to indicate that they were under discussion. Not only does this give the viewer a sense of how "green" an annotation is, it is also an incentive for users to contribute their own expertise to new annotations.

HIFI GENE LIST SNAPSHOT