THE PUBLIC FACE OF TAIR: USER INTERFACE DESIGN AND COMMUNITY FEEDBACK

¹ Carnegie Institution, 260 Panama St., Stanford, CA 94305

The TAIR website (http://www.arabidopsis.org/) is a gateway into the relational database which houses the vast amount of information collected and curated by our staff. Since TAIR exists to serve the plant biology research community, it is essential that we make the information stored in the database available to this community in the most useful and transparent way possible. To accomplish this we have developed a range of search and graphic display tools, search results pages and object detail pages designed with the perspective of the biologist in mind. Our goals in designing new interfaces include consistency with existing interfaces to minimize confusion and maintain a cohesive look and feel, and balancing of complexity (availablility of every possible feature and type of information) against simplicity and ease of use. The recent conversion of most TAIR pages from HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to JSP (Java Server Pages) will permit us to more flexibly accommodate users of different backgrounds and interests by customizing pages to include only tools and data of interest. Our mandate to serve the needs of the plant biology community also requires that we be responsive to user input of all kinds, ranging from simple questions about where to find information or how to use tools, to suggestions for improvement of datasets and tools or requests for specialized datasets. We accomplish this by including allowing users to post comments directly on object detail pages, using open source tracking software (Jitterbug) to assign, respond to and archive user questions to TAIR, and making custom datasets available in our User Requests ftp directory (ftp://tairpub:tairpub@ftp.arabidopsis.org/home/tair/User_Requests).