糖心TV

The Ensemble website is a genome browser. It, makes complex genomics information available, and is capable of displaying a lot of this information in a variety of ways. Over the years, the website has become an important resource to the research community and continues to expand the data it provides and the various ways it displays this data. As an inevitable result of this ever growing amount of data, and number of displays, using the Ensembl website can be a challenge to novice users. The Ensembl web site therefore has a help system, which provides explanations about the data and displays. At present many users however still struggle to use the site and contact the outreach teams with questions. Many of these questions are answered in the help pages. It is clear that the current verbose one size fits all approach the information is presented in poses challenges to users who are lost on the website and refer to the help pages. A verbose one-size fits all help with a lot of navigational option may cause the user to become the lost in hyperspace in the help itself.

An additional challenge is the existence of sites based on the Ensembl site such as Vega and Ensembl Genomes. These websites are similar in function, but have a different target audience and display different data. Therefore the information on the help pages of the Ensembl websites also applies to these derived sites in many places. However there are often subtle, and sometimes not so subtle, differences. The approach of taking the Ensembl help and manually sifting through it for these subtle differences is tedious and time consuming.