The User Perspective

Michelle Osmond

The Research Challenge

• Molecular biology, biochemistry, plant biology, genetics, toxicology, chemistry, and more.

• A global company with primary research sites in the US, UK, Switzerland, and France.

Windber Research Institute:A Web Portal for

Translational Medicine

• Provide a web based research environment suitable for a broad community of clinicians and biomedical informaticians

• Collaboration between a number of geographically separated research institutions and medical centers

• 30+ users at 3+ different sites

• We work to improve plants and how they are used

Expectations of e-Research

• Data electronically gathered for several years

• Need a data analysis tool targeted specifically for a clinical research community

• We are a technology company: aware of possibilities

• The community is in many ways still in the process of transitioning to a modern IT infrastructure

• Familiar with technology and already using

Functional & Non-Functional Requirements

• Administration

• Computational

• Data sharing and integration

– Complex data structure

• Workflow

– “plug and play” informatics environment

– Dynamic, iterative process

– Flexible, cross-domain work

• Visualisation

• Collaboration tools

• Administration

– Maintainable

• Computational

– scalable

• Data sharing and integration

• Workflow

– Dynamic, iterative process

• Visualisation

• Collaboration tools

Usability Requirements

Two different types of users:

• Biomedical informatics staff:

– Powerful analytical tool that can offer them a high degree of flexibility in their research. 

• Clinicians:

– Intuitive web-based user interface

– Minimal training required

• Ease of use

• Make complex tasks easy to specify: workflow deployment

• Ability to create portal services in-house

• Bug-free

• Error reporting and prevention could become very important

• Access to tools and resources

– In-house tools/services

– Data

Lessons Learnt – Portal Strengths

• Highly interactive

• High degree of flexibility in relation to other web based OLAP tools

• Design and build own workflows and deploy them to the portal

– Flexibility - I have not found too many user requests that could not be solved with a portal tool.

• Ease of use

Lessons Learnt – Portal Weaknesses

• Lack of comprehensive security model

– Data security, granularity

• Range of tools could be expanded

• Quality of content could be improved

• Creation and deployment of new workflows requires expertise and time.

• Deployment tool

– Not nice GUI

– Layout of services not customisable enough

• Reporting

• Error handling

Lessons Learnt – Portal Alternatives?

• Given our requirements, a thick client solution was never considered as an alternative

• There are some bioinformatics applications, in particular VectorNTI, that are used daily by our scientists. If their API can leverage web services well we could conceivably have a lot of users accessing tools through it.

Future Plans for the Portal

• A more advanced and expandable data model

• More data from other projects

• New web tools for exploring and visualising the patient data

• Develop and deploy more workflows

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