Embedding e-Science Applications - Designing and Managing for Usability

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.