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.

Multicontigview was ported in later

21. Help

Videos (youtube)

http://www.youtube.com/user/EnsemblHelpdesk

Tutorials page

http://www.ensembl.org/info/website/tutorials/index.html

FAQs

22. Images and Videos in Help 23. Is it better?

Survey more people are using it daily.

More ways to add pages

No hidden pages

Two ways to navigate, not just one (buttons + left hand links)

More help

24. What did we learn?

No matter how you promote it, people will freak

Good to have concurrent old+new versions

Everything took longer than planned!

No fixed answer redesign still going on as pages are improving as we go.

25. Acknowledgments

Fiona Cunningham, Anne Parker, James Smith and the entire

Ensembl Webteam (Sanger)

Xos and the Helpdesk