If you are interested in making the most of your scientific website, database or software, learning how to convert user feedback into new developments is key. And putting the user at the centre was a key aspect of the redesign of Expasy, SIB’s user-friendly knowledge discovery portal for life science. In this in silico talk, Chiara Gabella and Severine Duvaud, of our Resource Usability and Support team, guide you through the steps in the redesign project that led to a 15% increase in users, and provide you with a demo of how to use Expasy. The project is presented in depth in a recent publication in the journal Nucleic Acids Research.
Open the video in YouTube to access its description with more information about the speaker, individual chapters, etc.
Created in 1993, Expasy, the Swiss Bioinformatics Resource Portal, underwent a major overhaul in 2020. This overhaul followed User Experience principles, putting the user’s needs in first place in the design.
The “in silico talks” online series aims to provide bioinformaticians, life scientists and clinicians with the latest advances in bioinformatics methods, research or resources led by SIB Scientists, in a wide range of topics.
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In its latest version, Expasy’s intuitive interface offers users the possibility of browsing the 160 resources developed by SIB Groups, interconnected using the EDAM ontology, and listed through a user-friendly search and filter engine. Expasy thus provides contextual information on related resources for a specific need or domain, such as genomics, proteomics, structural biology, evolution, systems biology or text mining.
Chiara Gabella and Severine Duvaud who co-led the project (which was also highlighted among the 2020 SIB Remarkable Outputs), guide you through the steps in the redesign project which involved surveys, stakeholder workshops, wireframe proposals, user testing and, of course, implementation.
You will also learn how to use Expasy with a short demo and explore it from the perspective of a senior scientist working on muscle development, or a junior biologist starting a PhD in bioinformatics.
REFERENCES
Séverine Duvaud, Chiara Gabella, Frédérique Lisacek, Heinz Stockinger, Vassilios Ioannidis, Christine Durinx. Expasy, the Swiss Bioinformatics Resource Portal, as designed by its users, Nucleic Acids Research, 2021; https://doi.org/10.1093/nar/gkab225