Incorporating human experiences into the design process of a visualization tool: A case study from bioinformatics

Visualization tools are helpful in the analysis of large and complex information such as genomics data and biological phenomena. However, there exists a conceptual gap between how the tools actually work and the user experiences, tasks and behaviors. To design more human-centered tools that fully support the biologist's experiences, we have defined a framework, called UX-P (User Experiences to Patterns). The framework leverages the complicity of personas, a technique to capture user experiences, and design patterns - allowing us to narrow the gap between user experiences and the tool's design and features. First, HCI experts need to capture the user's needs, interaction behavior and task flow. This information can then be used to derive design patterns which are composed to create a conceptual design. To test and further improve this framework, we carried out an empirical study with users of a Bioinformatics visualization tool called Protein Explorer. Results of our empirical study will be presented.