The User Perspective Michelle Osmond The Research Challenge 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 • Molecular biology, biochemistry, plant biology, genetics, toxicology, chemistry, and more. • A global company with primary research sites in the US, UK, Switzerland, and France. 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 • – Maintainable • Workflow – “plug and play” informatics environment • Data sharing and integration • Workflow – Dynamic, iterative process – Dynamic, iterative process – Flexible, cross-domain work • Visualisation • Collaboration tools Computational – scalable – Complex data structure • Administration • Visualisation • Collaboration tools Usability Requirements • Two different types of users: • – In-house tools/services – Data Biomedical informatics staff: – Powerful analytical tool that can offer them a high degree of flexibility in their research. • Access to tools and resources 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 inhouse • Bug-free • 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 • Lack of comprehensive security model – Data security, granularity • Creation and deployment of new workflows requires expertise and time. • Deployment tool • Range of tools could be expanded – Not nice GUI • Quality of content could be improved – 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 end