Human-Computer Interaction Communicability Evaluation Method Applied to Bioinformatics

Abstract

Quality measures have different focuses and importance for distinct roles, like developers, maintainers, purchasers and end users. The focus of a quality evaluation may be internal, external quality or quality in use. This last one is the quality of the software product from the user’s point of view. Computer systems must satisfy determined quality criteria to assure interface characteristics of interest to their users and several evaluation methods can be applied to different objectives of quality in use. In bioinformatics, creating visual tools that can adequately represent the complexity and volume of biological data while preserving a high level of usability is a challenge. It is difficult to combine both interface usability and data expressiveness, particularly with heterogeneous and very connected data. 2Path is a case in point, this is a database of metabolic networks for terpenoid biosynthesis. Using evaluation by observation through Communicability Evaluation Method (CEM), we measured the following quality criteria for an interface designed for 2Path: usability, user experience, accessibility, and communicability. The users were monitored during the use of the system, some of their utterances using the system were identified and mapped. We present here the results obtained and the perspectives of a new interface that aims to meet the post-evaluation requirements fully.