Embedding e-Science Applications - Designing and Managing for Usability

从本质上讲，e-Science项目汇集了来自不同学科、不同组织文化的研究人员和开发人员，而且往往来自全球不同地区。这些项目往往涉及数十名研究人员和开发人员，他们彼此不认识，对项目目标可能有不同的理解，来自不同的背景和不同的技能集。有许多问题需要考虑，以确保项目的成功。该项目正在与一些现有的大型e-Science应用程序合作，以了解团队如何沟通和协作，并确定可用性设计和管理中存在的障碍和困难，以及可以做些什么来克服它们。该项目的研究人员将与电子科学应用、跟踪活动、视频互动和采访研究人员的研究团队合作，以确定问题。涉及的e-Science应用程序正在使用协作技术，很像视频会议，允许研究人员相互交谈，共享数据、图像和其他信息，并使用大型国家计算机和数据库系统。该项目将有助于改进这些工具和技术在科学协作中的使用，并将为通过注重交流和协作来管理这些项目提供指导方针。

By their very nature e-Science projects bring together researchers and developers from different disciplines, organisational cultures and often from different parts of the globe. The projects often involve many tens of researchers and developers who don't know each other, who may have a different understanding of the goals of the project, and who come from different backgrounds and with different skill sets. There are a number of issues that need to be considered to ensure the project is successful. This project is working with a number of existing large-scale e-Science applications to understand how the groups communicate and collaborate and to identify where there are barriers and difficulties to usability design and management, and what can be done to overcome them. Researchers from this project will be working with research teams in the e-Science applications, shadowing activities, videoing interactions and interviewing researchers to identify issues. The e-Science applications involved are using collaborative technologies, rather like video conferencing, to allow the researchers talk to each other, share data, images and other information, and are using large national computers and database systems. This project will help improve the use of these tools and technologies in science collaborations and will provide guidelines for managing these projects through this focus on communication and collaboration.