e-Science, users & usability

For the past eight years, the UK's e-Science programme has operated as a coordinated initiative across all the Research Councils, providing large scale funding for innovative activities to develop e-Science techniques and demonstrate their use across a broad range of research and applications. However, despite funding more than 100 projects in the first five years of the programme, little is still known about users of e-Science technologies, or how the tools are used. The UK e-Science Usability Task Force successfully alerted the community to the lack of awareness of users and their concerns resulting in a paper that informed EPSRCs Embedding e-Science These projects are soon coming to an end and it is critical to share knowledge from this research and to maintain the investigations into user engagement. This is important, as knowledge of use, users, and usability of e-Science tools can inform the development of new tools, encouraging their uptake, and increasing the sustainability of both tools (which are often only funded on a short-term basis) and the efforts of the communities surrounding them. In this session, we shall discuss various aspects of usability and user centred design which have emerged from e-Science and related Web 2.0 research projects. We hope to discuss the best ways in which users of e-Science tools and techniques can be identified, studied, and aided, and how e-Science projects can be encouraged to involve their user community in the project to increase the usability (and therefore success) of any tools that they provide. We encourage the submission of papers related to themes of use and usability of e-science projects. Submitting a paper to the workshop means that if the paper is accepted, at least one author should attend the workshop to present the paper.