User experience insights help design better services for researchers
A key question is right there in the URL usegalaxy.org.au: How do you use Galaxy Australia? Australian BioCommons User Experience Designer, Mok, recently analysed the journeys that users take when accessing the Galaxy Australia service. Mok’s research has provided a clear direction for improvement that has been taken up by the international Galaxy project. Simple, fundamental changes are planned based on how you use Galaxy.
The Galaxy Australia team’s commitment to constantly improving the service required insight into the many different ways that researchers use Galaxy. Mok worked with Galaxy Australia’s user experience designer, Madeline Bassetti to examine the experiences of Australian users.
Mok’s findings provide a visual story of how researchers interact with Galaxy Australia, including developing personas for different types of users including bioinformaticians, e-research analysts and PhD students. Each persona has distinct characteristics (eg. their familiarity with using Galaxy), allowing the Galaxy team to further analyse user experience within the appropriate context and prioritise which new features and improvements to implement first.
Interactions with Galaxy Australia were investigated according to the stages of plan, collect, process, analyse, preserve, share and reuse, as described in the ELIXIR RDMkit data lifecycle. Many users begin their journey at the analysis stage, however Mok’s research identified that Galaxy Australia has an important role to play at each lifecycle stage. By documenting users’ pain points, Mok identified opportunities and recommendations to improve Galaxy Australia across the whole data lifecycle. After a recent presentation at the Galaxy Community Conference, the international gathering of Galaxy developers shared that they “found the talk super helpful, particularly the user journey maps,” and noted that “this work is a huge time saver for the rest of the [international] Galaxy project.”
As a result, Mok was invited to present a full report at one of the Galaxy Community Calls, where US, EU and Australian Galaxy development teams gather to share updates and discuss improvements to the Galaxy. An international team has formed to combine Mok’s work with website analytics to gain further insights. Ultimately, this user journey research will inform future improvements to the entire Galaxy ecosystem.
Go ahead and look at the latest updates, start your own journey to use Galaxy, or if you have a deeper interest, consider joining a Galaxy Community Call in the future - everyone is welcome!