Giulietta Spudich and Anne Parker talk to the EBI Interfaces group about some of the steps that the Ensembl team followed when redesigning the Ensembl website.
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1. The Ensembl Redesign Giulietta Spudichand Anne Parker
2. This Talk
Old design
Feedback on issues to be investigated
Testing the new prototypes
New design (feedback)
3. Old Contigview I did not realise the yellow menu was context
sensitive How do I get to BLAST? How do I change the tracks? Why is
Ensembl always so slow? 4. Old Geneview Design How do I get to that
page with the SNPs?What should I click on? Everything is very wordy
I never look at the yellow bar! I didnt know you could do that in
Ensembl! 5. Gene Info all in One Page Leads to long pages, useful
for those who print out and manually scan Some pages would no
longer open (too much information) Hard to see where this was going
in terms of new data 6. Issues (or Opportunities?)
Speed of page rendering
Discoverability of content
Navigability
How will we add more info to already long pages?
7. Speed Slow and Slower 8. Tracking Response Time 9. Increasing
Species and Sizes 10. From Where Do We Get User Feedback?
User Survey (Survey Monkey) (400 respondants)
Workshops (Feedback) (92 last year)
Helpdesk questions (60-70 a week)
11. The Redesign
Internal Testing with Prototypes
Discussion and vote for Ensembl developers- tabs or left hand
links?
External testing at UCL, Cambridge, Oxford
Test sites (Survey and Exposed in Workshops)
12. The Redesign Timeline N O V E M B E R 13. Old Help
No track-based help
Page help was long (as were the pages!)
No videos or images
No underlying help database, static pages.
14. Initial Plan
Simplify the pages:
Concentrate on our three focus objects Gene, Transcript and
Location
Make navigation between these objects clear
Reduce the information per page more pages, more graphic (less
text)
Help database
Track descriptions from the analysis table
15. Speed improvements (code)
Caching of images (Apache), HTML, user and session data using
memcached (more use of users computer, less of our servers)
Smaller pages
Cleaner HTML, CSS and Javascript
Ajax components/templates
Minimise whitespace in the JavaScript
Merge JavaScript and CSS files
Monolithic to Modular code
16. How did we let people know it would change?
Ensembl-announce
Blog post
Test site (workshops)
17. How did we let people know it had changed?
Ensembl-announce
Blog post
Main page-what changed? Amazon
18. Change is Good?
Dear Sir, I just think the new web page look not good than
before, like the 1. first page need show any thing convenient. 2.
most people would don't like deep nesting page and confused 3.
please let the page looks compaction. Best regard!
I prefer the old version than the new one. In the new one, I
can't find the promoter region or the intron region. Would you
please tell me how to find them? Thanks a lot!
I hated the new version of office when itfirst came out ;-) 19.
Post Design
User Survey after 6 months
Helpdesk (60-70 questions per week)
Workshops (verbal)
20. Ongoing
Can configure this page be more obvious?
Where is the old ExonView?
Blog tip, FAQ
After 6 months (from the new design) the survey told us to
change some link names.