Week Three: HCI

Content:

Well to begin it appears we've all defined HCI in one way or another, but to sum it all up HCI is very important in the aspect that it makes or breaks or even kills a product.  A good HCI for any product will attract users while a bad one will result in loss of users.  For example a common HCI we meet with everyday are the websites we visit on a daily basis, whether its a research database, social networking site, or even this blog site. 

With regards to HCI and BMI interaction, we can consider the numerous web-based genetic tools available out there for sequence representation and analysis.  A lot of the data is generated and stored in a manner that is not really appealing or even sensible to the human eye; however these interfaces such the genomic browser (GBrowse provided by SGD for the S288 strain of Saccharomyces cervisiae - yeast) attempts to make the data viewable and interpretable by the user.  This makes the data the computer can read usable and useful universally across experienced and novice users.  The interface is fairly easy to learn, it increases the performance of identifying genetic features (imagine having to identify a gene by counting base pairs and performing transcription and translation to find out where it starts and stops in text file vs a graphical interface that shows you the location, length, and direction of the gene).  As well the interface works to decrease data errors since you are not counting base pairs splitting them into codons to identify start, stops, introns, exons, etc.  And lastly with my personal use as well as colleagues I have found that we are typically satisfied with HCI provided by SGD to bridge the gap between computer optimized data and human preference, understanding, and interpretation of the sequence data.

And if anyone is interested in the yeast genome, its available at http://www.yeastgenome.org/cgi-bin/gbrowse/scgenome/?name=chrII:1..813178 (this is chromosome II in full)

Posted by Eric