COVID-19 Data Portal

Company
European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI)

Role
UX/UI Designer

Duration
February 2021 – February 2024

Collaborated with

COVID-19 Data Portal team, Web Development team, Communications team, external collaborators such as funders, scientists and more

Summary

The European Bioinformatics Institute is a world leader in providing public biomolecular data – each day, EBI’s resources receive an average of over 101 million requests, primarily from scientists and researchers across the globe.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, EBI published a website specifically for COVID-19 data. When I joined the team in 2021, I helped expand on the existing website and design additional features as the pandemic, and researchers’ needs, evolved.

The goal

Design a portal where researchers can access COVID-19 data
Improve the usability, functionality and accessibility of the site
Work with other organizations to build their own COVID-19 portals

Redesigning the search

The COVID-19 Data Portal hosts many different kinds of biological data, so when the site was first built, there was no global search for the entire site. Implementing such a global search would require significant planning in terms of scalability and how to present different results together, such as cross-sectional studies and sequenced data.

Usability testing

During the development of the data portal, there was ongoing usability testing. During some of the usability testing sessions, I noticed that participants did not always know where they would find a particular piece of data – for example, whether it would be a host sequence or a viral sequence.

Survey

One possible solution for this would be to implement a global search. That way, users would be able to search for the relevant data without first selecting a category.

After conversations with both internal and external stakeholders, I ran a survey which confirmed that better navigation and data filtering were some of the most desired features for the COVID-19 Data Portal.

One of the survey questions focused on improving the user experience of the data portal

The results from the survey showed a strong interest in better data filtering and in improved navigation. After discussing with the team, we felt like both of those concerns could be addressed by the addition of a global search.

The redesigned search

I redesigned the header section of the COVID-19 Data portal to include a search feature, which also becomes the primary action above the fold. This radically changed the user journey throughout the site – now users were much more likely to just search right away, as opposed to having to select a category first.

Measuring outcomes

An additional round of usability testing was carried out with 5 users on a development version of the site. Overall, users were much more likely to both perform a search and to find a target section of data (a host sequence).

Feedback was also solicited from known users and partners. This feedback was positive in terms of preferring the global search over searches within categories.Additional, one researcher pointed out they were much less likely to miss data which they believed to be in one category when it actually related to a different category.

Filters and tables

The COVID-19 Data Portal has large amounts of data, so being able to view and filter this data in different ways is important to our users. The data itself comes in many different formats, such as viral sequences, animal samples and research papers – which all require their own methods of filtering and sorting.

Coverage slider

In DNA sequencing, coverage refers to how much of the given DNA has been sequenced or read. On the portal, we offer ways to filter by this criteria to find data that has been more, or less sequenced.

During a usability test on filtering data, I noticed that some users spent time changing this filter quickly just to see how many results would be returned. They wanted to deal with a more manageable set of results, but it was unclear how much they would need to filter the data to reduce the number of results.

As a result of this, I had the idea to change the design of the coverage slider so that it would offer visual clues to how many results will fall in a given range.