ViBe-DRS: A dual RNA Sequencing Application
My Role: Lead Researcher
Summer 2021-Fall 2022
Introduction
From the beginning of summer in 2021 to the Fall of 2022 I worked on a project called Visualizing Host-Pathogen Interactions in Dual RNA-Sequencing Data Through the Further Development of the ViBe-DRS application. Although I was the Lead Researcher for the project, my main work consisted of conducting usability studies, heuristic evaluations, creating help documentation, and front end development. Built by the group of researchers before mine, ViBe-DRS is a dual RNA-sequencing application that visualizes and analyzes two RNA strands in parallel and allows you to compare them simultaneously.
Background Research
Coming from a Computer Science background, my researchers and I had little to no experience in the field of dual RNA-Seq. To combat this obstacle we took the first few months of our research taking a DIYTranscriptomics course, which helped us gain an understanding of what we were building and the uses for it. After that I conducted a literature review/competitive analysis of a little over 30 sources and compiled the most useful sources into a document. We took that document and used it to try and understand what exactly people expect from an RNA-seq application, and where the industry is in terms of progress of the creation of these applications. Since the overall goal for my group of researchers was to improve the application, this information came in very handy. The DIYTranscriptomics course combined with our literature review/competitive analysis, gave us a solid groundwork to further improve the already built ViBe-DRS application.
2021
In 2021, my research partner and I conducted a heuristic evaluation that helped us come to the conclusion that Help and Documentation, and Aesthethic and Minimalist Design, were the 2 heuristics that were violated the most amount of times.
We also ran a 3 usability studies in the pilot stage of development, and the results are in the able on the right.
As a result of our feedback from our studies, we decided to focus on increasing help explanations and making the app clear and comprehensible during the following research year.
Evaluation
Like in 2021, in 2022 we ran another 3 usability studies, after some developmental changes my research partner at the time made, as well as a heuristic evaluation, of which the results are shown on the left side. We found that what users wanted to see the most, was help documentation. This was interesting because both the usability studies and the heuristic evaluation had to same conclusion. Because our participants in 2022 were people who had worked with RNA but had sequenced RNA, we were able to gain some valuable knowledge. They indicated which parts of the application were useful or easy to use and which ones were not, and we were able to guide our development from there.
Documentation Development
In order to fix the help and documentation problems, I set out to create a help and explanations tab, dedicated to instructions and examples of how to use the application, as well as instructions embedded in each tab of the application. However, after our usability studies, we found out the participants preferred not having to switch back and forth between tabs to get help. So, my solution was to add 4 help icons, associated with each tab, along the top of every page, which a short instruction manual for the tab they needed help with.The most important part of desiging this step was figuring out how to not crowd the screen but still have the text visible and easy to access. The picture on the side depicts the final solution.
Usability Studies
Alongside making help pages, my main focus was our usability testing. For our testing, in both years we ran our tests in the moderated call format. Though kept anonymous, our users were video recorded with their written consent and were offered compensation for their time. We asked our users to share their screen in a Zoom call while using the app and encouraged them to think aloud. We also conducted a post study survery for each participants and used that feedback plus what we observed to come up with pain points.
Conclusion and What's Next
We came to a few conclusions after our research. The first being that aesthetic changes made a huge difference on how people interacted with the application, with small front end changes made by both me and my research partner in 2022, we were able to significantly decrease the amount of heuristic violations in that category. Second, we found that adding new features based off of 2021's research made the app feel somewhat more useful for the users the next year. And finally, our added help and documentation features made the app more user friendly and easy to use for people of different skill levels and disciplines.
Research Links
Below are links to published extended abstracts that I have written, as well as a copy of the slide deck we used in presentations, and a not published extended abstract from 2022.