User Interfaces PDG Workspace Sarah Poon Computational Research - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

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User Interfaces PDG Workspace Sarah Poon Computational Research - - PowerPoint PPT Presentation

User Interfaces PDG Workspace Sarah Poon Computational Research Division Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Outline: Motivations User-Centered Design Technical Implementation Pilot User Study Ancillary Efforts


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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 1

User Interfaces

PDG Workspace

Sarah Poon

Computational Research Division Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory Outline:

  • Motivations
  • User-Centered Design
  • Technical Implementation
  • Pilot User Study
  • Ancillary Efforts
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 2

PDG System & Components

PDG Java API (database access, macro processing, ...) Modernized PDG database PDG Python API Legacy editor interface Legacy viewer (pdgLive) Legacy Fortran programs Encoder interface / Literature search Database viewer (pdgLive) Review interface Verfier interface Editor interface Monitoring Institution data entry Ordering system Data analysis applications Admin tools

Users (PDG authors, HEP community)

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 3

Why do we need PDG Workspace?

  • 2010 edition, 2158 new measurements
  • 176 authors
  • Currently, the editor does all database input of encodings
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 4

Why do we need PDG Workspace?

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 5

User-Centered Design

  • Needs assessment
  • Interviews
  • Participant observation
  • Defining design goals & challenges
  • Prototyping
  • Iterative process
  • Continuous scientist feedback
  • Usability Tests
  • Pilot study completed
  • Further studies planned
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 6

User Profile

  • Geographically dispersed
  • A small number of expert users
  • Mostly casual users - as rarely as once per year
  • 20’s - 70+ yrs - varied technical readiness
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 7

Roles

Literature searchers: scan the published HEP literature for new measurements Encoders: experts who carefully read papers, decide exactly what information should be included into RPP, and produce the encodings Overseers: read papers and cross-check encoders, oversee fits & averages, produce summary tables, handle Reviews Editor: handles all computing, editorial, etc. tasks

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 8

Task Analysis

  • Keep track of assigned papers
  • Enter in new measurements
  • ex) 0.672 +-0.001 +-0.011
  • Create new data blocks
  • ex) decay modes
  • ex) branching ratios
  • Use to facilitate a workflow
  • Passing encodings from encoder to overseer
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 9

User-Centered Design

  • Needs assessment
  • Interviews
  • Participant observation
  • Defining design goals & challenges
  • Prototyping
  • Iterative process
  • Continuous scientist feedback
  • Usability Tests
  • Pilot study completed
  • Further studies planned
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 10

Design Goals & Challenges

  • Multi user-system
  • Task tracking is important
  • Customizable
  • Both expert and casual users
  • Intuitive to use
  • Some will only use once a year
  • Math display
  • A major challenge displaying math in a browser
  • Cross Browser Compatibility
  • Javascript toolkits, standard CSS
  • Ability to perform complex tasks easily
  • Ex) Entering in a branching ratio
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 11

Design Challenge - BR’s

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 12

User-Centered Design

  • Needs assessment
  • Interviews
  • Participant observation
  • Defining design goals & challenges
  • Prototyping
  • Iterative process
  • Continuous scientist feedback
  • Usability Tests
  • Pilot study completed
  • Further studies planned
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 13

Prototyping - Sketches

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 14

Prototypes - Design #1

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 15

Prototypes - Design #1

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 16

Prototypes - Design #2

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 17

V0 Design

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 18

Technical Implementation

Java API Java Data Access Objects (DAO) Java Web Applications (Stripes Framework)

Server Side

HTML CSS Javascript (JQuery)

Client Side

Database

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 19

Math Display

Reviewed 3 technologies: jsMath, MathML, mimeTeX

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 20

Test Summary Chart

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 21

Math Display - Summary

  • MathML (chosen)
  • XML for describing math, product of World Wide Web Consortium (W3C)
  • Rendering quickly, quality depends on browser support
  • Hard to author the XML
  • ASCIIMathML.js for converting subset of TeX to MathML
  • Js solution can be slow, so considering Macro to MathML or server-side translator
  • mimeTeX
  • fallback solution for users with browsers that don’t support MathML well
  • cgi script that produces images
  • Renders decently, but inline vertical alignment is hard to adjust
  • Consistent across browsers
  • jsMath
  • Javascript
  • Renders very nicely but can be very slow
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 22

User-Centered Design

  • Needs assessment
  • Interviews
  • Participant observation
  • Defining design goals & challenges
  • Prototyping
  • Iterative process
  • Continuous scientist feedback
  • Usability Studies
  • Pilot study completed
  • Further studies planned
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 23

Pilot Usability Test

  • User test to recognize major design flaws by someone not

very familiar with the work

  • Participant is a casual user, high technical readiness
  • Given a task list, the participant tries to complete the tasks

without any help or direction

  • Intervention by test giver usually indicates a design flaw
  • Tasks:
  • edit paper details
  • add measurement
  • create decay
  • create br
  • sign off encoding
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 24

Pilot Study - Results

Task Difficulty Test Result

Edit paper details Easy Completed < 2 min Add measurement Medium Completed < 5 min Add decay Difficult Intervention needed Add branching ratio Difficult Completed < 5 min, but after previous intervention Signoff Easy Completed < 1 min

  • Results:
  • Of the 5 tasks, 1 required intervention (though another only discovered after

intervention)

  • These were related to functionality discovery (where do you add a new branching

ratio)

  • Once functionality discovered, participant felt the interaction was very easy

and was surprised that such difficult tasks were possible

  • Felt there should be more cues that a certain workflow is involved
  • Overall felt ready to use the system to encode
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 25

Design Changes

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 26

Ancillary Efforts

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 27

Web GUI Testing

  • Functional Tests
  • Junit, mock objects
  • Integration Tests
  • Canoo Web Tests
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 28

Documentation

  • Code Documentation
  • Stripes tutorial, how to add pages to the web application
  • Javadoc
  • User Documentation
  • User Manuals - ‘getting started guides’ and faq’s
  • Demos - flash or Coscripter demos (Firefox add-on)
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 29

End User Feedback

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 30

Conclusion

  • PDG Workspace enables a new way for collaborative authoring of

the RPP using modern methods that scale and are maintainable

  • Careful design and evaluation paid off
  • Pilot study showed the system easy to use, even for complex operations
  • A significant number of encodings could already be entered today

using the existing version of the encoding system (after testing is completed)

  • All the normal encodings + many complex operations could be done
  • All the difficult work has been done once as part of the encoding

system, and can now be replicated to build the other user interfaces

  • The building blocks for pdgLive exist within the encoding system (the

datablock browser)

  • Technologies and ingredients have been proven to work
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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 31

Backup Slides

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 32

Overview of Current Design

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 33

Task List

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 34

Reference Details

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 35

Add Measurement

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 36

Decay Mode Editor

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 37

Branching Ratio Editor

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 38

Review & Sign Off

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 39

Add Reference

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PDG Computing Review, September 17, 2010 Sarah Poon (LBNL), Page 40

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