Cognitive Walkthrough

1. 1st November 2010 Cognitive Walkthrough BioMapper Bioinformatics Workflow Tool

2. What is a Cognitive Walkthrough? • A cognitive walkthrough focuses on the usability of the software being evaluated. • It is not a demonstration, focus group or training session. • Each task requires a series of actions to take place in order to complete the task. An image is shown for each step in the task and the evaluator(you) must work out the next correct action to take. • Objective is to discover: A. How easy is the system to learn. B. Discover any confusing actions(steps) or tasks. C. Is there enough information for the user to make the next correct step in a task. D. Is anything missing.

3. Why do a Cognitive Walkthrough? • Cognitive Walkthrough is a usability test used in software development. • Developers want to produce usable software but may not be experts in a domain so rely on experts in the domain(you) for feedback. • Users input is very important, after all they will be using the software!

4. How does a cognitive walkthrough work? • A series of tasks are “walked through” one at a time e.g. Create, run, etc. • A walkthrough is done by using images to simulate a user performing a task with the software. The evaluators (you) are given 5-10 seconds to workout what to do on each new image in the task, then the user simulating software explains what to do in the image. This is repeated for many images until the task is complete. • Usability issues are discovered when evaluators don't understand what the happened or expected something else to happen in the image.

5. What must you do? • As each image is shown, imagine yourself as the the user and what you would do next in the image shown e.g. mouse click on menu. You will be given some time to do this. • If the actual user does something that you did not expect or you don't understand... SPEAK UP. This is a usability problem. • There are some points to keep in mind when doing the walkthrough: - Did you recognise the control as the correct one to use as the next step? - Do you think you would have done the step shown? - Does the interface give you a fair opportunity to work out what to do? - Do you think the feedback is meaningful?

6. Rules of a Cognitive Walkthrough • Looking for problems, not solutions. When a problem is found it is noted and the walkthrough continues. • The chairperson (John) may cut discussions short to keep the meeting on track, but issues raised will be noted and followed up after the meeting.

7. BioMapper • BioMapper is a bioinformatics workflow tool. A workflow is a series of activities, as one activity finishes the next activity begins. • BioMapper goals are: - Make building workflows user friendly - Easy to learn and use - Provide data management facilities - Provide tractability - Provide security - Produce publishable output www.biotechtools.org

8. Tasks • There are 3 tasks to walkthrough: • Create a workflow template • Change default settings in the created template. • Run the workflow.

9. Task 1. Create a Template • The workflow template we build will perform 3 different activities. • Similarity Search using Blastp on a protein sequence • Muliple sequence Alignment using ClustalW • Phylogenetic tree analysis using Pylipprotpars

30. Task 1. Create a Template Task Completed! Any suggestions/comments on usability?

31. Task 2. Change settings • The settings for the web services are on the default settings. The user wants to change the settings in order to narrow the search and produce a better(but slower) multiple alignment. • In Blastp change the Matrix algorithm from Blosum62 to Blosum80. Also search the UniprotKB Bacteria database. • B. In ClustalW change the pairwise alignment type from fast to slow.

42. Task 2. Change settings Task Completed! Any suggestions/comments on usability?

43. Task 3. Run Workflow • The user wants to run the workflow. • The protein sequence to use in the search query must be entered.