Transcript The User Perspective

The User Perspective
Michelle Osmond
The Research Challenge
Windber Research Institute:
A Web Portal for
Translational Medicine
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Provide a web based research
environment suitable for a broad
community of clinicians and
biomedical informaticians
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Collaboration between a number of
geographically separated research
institutions and medical centers
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30+ users at 3+ different sites
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We work to improve plants
and how they are used
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Molecular biology, biochemistry,
plant biology, genetics, toxicology,
chemistry, and more.
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A global company with primary
research sites in the US, UK,
Switzerland, and France.
Expectations of e-Research
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Data electronically gathered for
several years
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Need a data analysis tool targeted
specifically for a clinical research
community
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We are a technology company:
aware of possibilities
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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
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Administration
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Computational
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Data sharing and integration
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– Maintainable
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Workflow
– “plug and play” informatics environment
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Data sharing and integration
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Workflow
– Dynamic, iterative process
– Dynamic, iterative process
– Flexible, cross-domain work
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Visualisation
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Collaboration tools
Computational
– scalable
– Complex data structure
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Administration
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Visualisation
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Collaboration tools
Usability Requirements
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Two different types of users:
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– In-house tools/services
– Data
Biomedical informatics staff:
– Powerful analytical tool that can
offer them a high degree of
flexibility in their research.
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Access to tools and
resources
Clinicians:
– Intuitive web-based user interface
– Minimal training required
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Ease of use
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Make complex tasks easy to
specify: workflow deployment
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Ability to create portal services inhouse
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Bug-free
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Error reporting and prevention
could become very important
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
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Lack of comprehensive security
model
– Data security, granularity
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Creation and deployment of new
workflows requires expertise and time.
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Deployment tool
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Range of tools could be expanded
– Not nice GUI
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Quality of content could be
improved
– Layout of services not customisable
enough
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Reporting
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Error handling
Lessons Learnt – Portal Alternatives?
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Given our requirements, a thick
client solution was never
considered as an alternative
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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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