A Pilot Study into the Usability of a Scientific Workflow Construction Tool

We describe a recent pilot study into the usability of the scientific workflow creation and enactment tool called Taverna. Both programmers and non-programmers were used as subjects for a defined programming task. We used a combination of user observation and questionnaires to determine programming efficiency roadblocks in the tool. More generally, differences between the roadblocks encountered by programmers and nonprogrammers suggest that pilot studies are crucial to inform the proper evaluation of novice programming tools. The study also suggests that there is a high demand for reusable Life Sciences workflows, due to both their ability to facilitate human-human communication about data analysis, and their ability to simplify repetitive operations used by bench scientists. Most roadblocks to Taverna programming are interface related, but a more fundamental issue is related to data input and type enforcement. Despite UI issues, we discovered users’ willingness to re-use and modify workflows, which leads us to suggest that programs first be created in simpler tools as a stepping stone in end-user development for the Life Sciences.

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