Rebecca Shapley1, Denise Green2, and Brent Mishler3
1 Akodon Ecological Consulting, 951 Bancroft Road #111A, Concord, CA 94518, USA
2 School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS), University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94706, USA
3 University and Jepson Herbarium, Valley Life Sciences Building, University of California at Berkeley, Berkeley, CA 94720, USA
As biodiversity informatics rises to the technological challenge of pulling together the immense quantities of information required for answering today’s research questions, it becomes important to turn our attention to the systems through which this information is delivered. User-centred interface and system design choices are important to accomplishing the final step of actually serving the data’s intended audience well.
In the United States, the National Science Foundation’s emphasis on funding projects with a broader impact has inspired many scientists to hope that web-based informatics databases can help with bringing real science experiences into the K-12 classroom. In this talk, we describe the results of a user needs assessment project (http://groups.sims. berkeley.edu/TOL) that aimed to improve our understanding of how a future web-based application to visualize compiled phylogenetic information (a.k.a. the Tree of Life) might be used in education. Through talking with future users, we developed recommendations for the application that a) were contrary to our initial expectations in important ways, thus demonstrating the importance of talking to users b) highlight important general usability issues for biodiversity information when used by non-taxonomists and c) suggest how user-centered design can guide information system development in order to not just deliver information to our target audiences, but to serve important goals they have for using the information.
We gratefully acknowledge the support of the National Science Foundation-funded CIPRES project, the School of Information Management and Systems at the University of California at Berkeley, and others for making this project possible.