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

Introduction

We are currently developing a potential interface for manual functional annotation as an add-on to the existing Joint Genome Inistitute (JGI) Integrated Microbial Genomes (IMG) data analysis system, available at http://img.jgi.doe.gov. The IMG system gives users access to the genomes of hundreds of organisms sequenced at centers around the world, making it a logical home for a collaborative annotation system. Users have made many requests, throughout the lifetime of the IMG system, for a system which would allow users to annotate genes, upload these annotations for others to see, and view other people's annotations.

To make a system that is credible for scientists, and to prevent abuse, our prototype incorporates a trust system, allowing users to see at a glance how reliable a given annotation or annotator is likely to be. The trust scheme involves two levels of users, 'members' and 'fellows,' preventing those who have not proven themselves to be reliable annotators from abusing the system. Member access allows entry of annotations for those who obtain a login, while fellow access allows verification of other people's annotations and the use of batch operations, for those members who have been designated as such by other fellows or have made a threshold number of annotations that were verified by fellows. To allow interoperability with existing bioinformatics tools, our system also draws on controlled vocabularies based on existing ontology systems.

This prototype system implements only collaborative functional annotation; for the present time, structural annotation remains outside of the scope of this project. The functional annotation system can be thought of as an additional feature set to be tightly integrated with the existing IMG system.

Purpose of this Study

To assess the ease with which IMG users are able to successfully annotate genes and collaborate with other users through our system, and to identify potential problems, we conducted a usability study. This study makes use of the second interactive prototype of our system, which addresses notes from the heuristic evaluation by the LightsOn group as well as intended changes we did not have time to make for the first interactive prototype.

This study was intended to get user feedback on collaborative elements of our proposed annotation system; as such, we requested that participants begin the assigned tasks from certain "starting pages" that tie together the existing system and the new features. We tailored our tasks to specifically test the annotation features, not the existing IMG system.

Our overarching goal was to obtain information to guide the building of a third interactive prototype, which we hope will provide an improved interaction flow and more relevant data for functional analysis.