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Parent Category: blog

Published on Thursday, 30 May 2024 05:50

By: Emily Van Poetsch (ELSIhub), Deanne Dolan (ELSIhub), and Claire Stirm (SGX3)

The Center for ELSI Resources & Analysis (CERA) is financially supported by the National Human Genome Research Institute at the National Institutes of Health (grant U24HG010733) and managed by teams at Stanford and Columbia Universities. The CERA mission is to build a community of multidisciplinary researchers focused on the ethical, legal, and social implications (ELSI) of genetics and genomics and provide the ELSIhub.org science gateway to enhance the production, sharing, and use of ELSI research.

CERA partnered with SGX3 to explore the usability of ELSIhub for new user groups as a foundational step in its plan to expand its user base beyond ELSI researchers toward groups that could benefit from greater awareness of their research results and products. Targeted new user groups, which were identified by the CERA Steering Committee and Advisory Board, include members of the public (especially individuals who are underrepresented as participants in genomics research studies), genetics researchers, genetics-focused trainees, and clinical geneticists. CERA also hoped to emerge from the usability study with concrete ideas for enhancing the search functionality of ELSIhub.org, which hosts curated databases of publications, data collection tools, funding opportunities, jobs, events, and a scholar directory.

The SGX3 usability team had three primary goals for the engagement:

1)    Using stakeholder mapping, gather data on the various target user groups, understand their important characteristics, and identify their needs and goals when visiting the website.

2)    Identify functionality gaps in the current information architecture and the website search user interface (UI) using these methods:

a.    Journey map the current website to identify pain points

b.    Perform a heuristic evaluation

c.     Complete a cognitive walkthrough, during which an expert evaluator is focused on the new user learning curve

d.    Engage potential users in task analysis or direct, expert evaluation of tasks as they are performed by users

e.    Gain information from competitive analysis of search features on similar science gateways.

3)    Provide the CERA team with actionable recommendations and solution mockups supported by user research.

Although the study results were limited due to a low response rate, and access to historical user activity data was limited by a recent migration of ELSIhub.org to Google Analytics 4, the SGX3 usability team identified several ways to enhance the search experience for both new and existing users. These included small fixes, such as communicating what users would find if they performed a search within the search bar and making search help more visible, as well as bigger enhancements like enabling the use of Boolean operators in alignment with the expectations of the desired user base; highlighting user search terms within the results list; increasing the size of the clickable area on search results cards; and converting keyword tags to search filters.

The usability study also suggested that new user experiences could be improved with animated, pop-up walk throughs of different ELSIhub.org features; navigation labels to show the position of the user within the website relative to their arrival page; and greater transparency about the function of CERA and how the ELSIhub website content is curated. In addition to their many recommendations, the SGX3 team provided the CERA team with annotated screenshots showing potential before-and-after UI improvements, which made their recommendations clear and actionable.

The CERA team is reviewing the results of the usability study, determining priority recommendations, and considering the collection of more information to continue the preparation of the ELSIhub.org gateway for its intended new user groups. In the fall, they plan to implement many of the study results, provided the recommendations are compatible with the capabilities of Drupal, the open-source platform management software they prefer to use.