Section Discussion: User Interfaces

[chicoqueiroz]

Please feel free to add new material / information on the subject.

Topics that could be addressed:

• UI / usability: traditionally seen as deficient aspect of scientific software.
• Increasing awareness of the subject, though

Case Studies

• Rebecca Springmeyer's use of the "designer-as-apprentice” methodology (1993)
• “Making Tea,” a pervasive, Tablet PC-based version of the lab book (Hughes et al. 2004).
• The Enzyme Portal (De Matos et al. 2013),
• OMERO imaging software (Macaulay et al. 2009; Sloan et al. 2009; Loynton et al. 2009)
• Biok
• PN Toolbox

Best Practices identified /collected from references

• Make sure GUI is needed and more productive than command line
• GUI bypassing
• Separate UI code from scientific calculations
• Design for expandability and integration with other software
• Continuously testing user interfaces; elaborating storyboards; observing field work (understand how scientists work); testing software in controlled environments; adding help systems planning usability cases
• Easy customization and configuration
• Flexibility /(frequent changes)
• Iterative
• Value precision over speed of use
• Prevent and fix errors
• Be careful with minimalism (skeumorphism can be better is some cases)
• Identifying software requirements based on user needs; Understanding how users work within their environment; Designing incrementally; and Performing user testing (Pancake 1996).
• Collaborative process
• Appropriate interfaces for each stage of scientific work
• Multiple types and levels of user specialization;
• Report generation; metadata;
• Productive modeling and workflow composition; insightful result analysis through visualizations, navigation, and manipulation of data in two, three or four dimensions. Adequate contextualization and integration between modeling, simulation, and result analysis phases.

[dangunter]

HCI research

Research & literature on formal HCI methods for designing usable software. A couple references on user-centered design and one on the more recent activity theory.

Pea, Roy D. "User centered system design: new perspectives on human-computer interaction." Journal educational computing research 3 (1987): 129-134.

Abras, Chadia, Diane Maloney-Krichmar, and Jenny Preece. "User-centered design." Bainbridge, W. Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications 37.4 (2004): 445-456.

Nardi, Bonnie A. Context and consciousness: activity theory and human-computer interaction. MIT Press, 1996.

[chicoqueiroz]

Also on usability [Edit]: Nielsen, Jakob, and Rolf Molich. "Heuristic evaluation of user interfaces." Proceedings of the SIGCHI conference on Human factors in computing systems. ACM, 1990.

Nielsen, Jakob. "Heuristic evaluation." Usability inspection methods 17.1 (1994): 25-62.

[chicoqueiroz]

Queiroz, Francisco and Rejane Spitz. 2016. "The Lens of the Lab: Design Challenges in Scientific Software" The International Journal of Design Management and Professional Practice 10 (3): pp.17-45.

Ferguson, Holly T., Sandra Gesing, and Jarek Nabrzyski. "Measuring usability in decision tools supporting collaborations for environmental disaster response." 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS). IEEE, 2016.

[chicoqueiroz]

Beg, Marijan, Ryan A. Pepper, and Hans Fangohr. "User interfaces for computational science: a domain specific language for OOMMF embedded in Python." arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.07432 (2016).

[chicoqueiroz]

A good paper on scientific software usability just came out: http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1005265