A Compilation of Usability Issues

The following is a list of usability isses compiled from our mailing lists, previous UI sanity checks and face-to-face interactions with users. The list is organized based on the UI component in question: (1) top-level menu, (2) activity palette, (3) graph/tree/contextual workflow view, (4) run/results view, and (0) general issues that do not fall into any of the previous categories. See images below for an illustration of each of UI components.

For the list of fixes planned for the Decemner 2008 release of Taverna - go here.

(0) General

Stop Taverna updating automatically (slows it down). Use on demand updates or notification.
Contextual help. Hover over help. All over Taverna Workbench.
Have all input and error display windows follow the same style or have similar outlook.
When more that one workflows are running in parallel, only the errors from the first workflow run get reported in console and the other one are 'lost'. Perhaps we need the log to show which workflow run it is coming from.
Having a 'Quick start' window when Taverna starts that will have buttons like 'New', 'Open/Load', and similar, and a 'tip of the day' with an option to switch the wizard off. There are buttons already on the toolbar that enable users to quickly open a new or load a saved workflow, so perhaps we just need a 'tip of the day'.
Some users did not like the splash screen showing the names of the jar files loaded - they mean nothing to them and appear too fast. They just wanted a progress bar or 'cogwheels spinning' instead.
Make all question/information/warning/error dialogs look the same, e.g. have the same icon.
Make all input dialogs look at least similar.
When closing multiple workflows that have to be saved - the "Do you want to save changes?" dialog does not display the name of the workflow so the user does not know which workflow the question refers to.

(1) Top-level Menu

Recently opened workflow list should be present in the 'File' menu. (JIRA T2-170, T2-247).
Keyboard shortcuts to open, save, create new, close a workflow.
Having 'Run workflow' under the 'File' menu does not seem right (JIRA T2-168)
'Preferences' menu item should let the user manage memory allocation without directly accessing info.plist. At the moment it is not easy to figure out how one goes about adjusting memory allocation, unless one asks the list or finds and reads a troubleshooting documentation. (JIRA T2-177)
Configuring the startup services (i.e. services that come with Taverna by default)?
Enabling/hiding perspectives should be under the 'Preferences' menu. (JIRA T2-210)
Apply button for 'Preferences' does not close window. (JIRA T2-209)
Workflows menu option should display the workflow file names rather than workflow titles, which are currently meaningless, e.g. dataflow0, dataflow1, etc. Also, in T2, currently there is no way to assign or change the workflow title.

(2) Activity Palette

The (local services) search facility should be moved from the activity palette to the top and should match anything that matches the entered text. Jump to, highlight and next matching object features.
In general, users do not know how to find services that are not local to Taverna - there should be a facility for searching and adding services from catalogues/repositories/registries. (There is a FETA plug-in for searching the FETA repository, but there is no searching facility for, say, Web services listed in http://www.mygrid.org.uk/wiki/Mygrid/BiologicalWebServices.)
Related to 2) - adding several (e.g. WSDL) services at once; populating all available services from a registry.
Possibility to re-order or prioritise activities. Possibility to organize services into 'favourites' or 'bookmark' them somehow, and then save them in order to share them.
Support for the latest RShell/RServe. Simultaneous support for various versions or RShell/RServe. (JIRA T2-206)
The term 'Available Activities' confusing for users, they were now sure what it meant. (Perhaps switch simply to 'Activities'?)
Right-click pop-up menu that appears on selecting an activity (in T1, currently not in T2) should be available as well as a menu option or from a toolbar.
Some users do not find the hierarchy of activities/services useful - they only care that these serviced do something, not which type of services they are.
When adding an activity fails, users want the previously entered wrong settings to be saved so that they can be edited and not entered all over again. If adding an activity succeeds, then repeated 'add activity' action should not remember the previously entered settings.
Auto-complete on URLs and similar content.
Annotations for activities/services and group of activities/services.

(3) Graph/Tree/Contextual Views

The name of the current workflow should be displayed somewhere to give a clue of the workflow the user is currently working with (really necessary when multiple workflows are opened). The same goes for windows or results - need to clearly display which workflow they belong to. (JIRA T2-172)
For displaying workflows, either to have them open in separate windows (window-per-workflow) so that the user can view them simultaneously or to have a tabbed interface. At the moment, it is difficult to say if multiple workflows are opened (the user has to go to the top-level menu 'Workflow'-> to switch to a different workflow. Some users expressed preference to window-per-workflow design as they want to be able to compare workflows and look at them simultaneously. (JIRA T2-173)
Keyboard facilities for general workflow editing such as copy, cut and paste (if appropriate), delete parts of a workflow. (JIRA T2-166)
Keyboard shortcuts for copy, cut and paste in beanshell (and other text) editors to work on a MAC in a standard way (i.e. with a CMD rather than a CTRL key). Add a few new shortcuts, e.g. go to start (CMD/CTRL-A) or end (CMD/CTRL-E) of the line. (JIRA T2-165) Or to allow users to launch their own editors to edit Beanshell etc. components, saving out to a temp file, which Taverna then re-loads into its XML when the user saves in their other editor.
The heavy use of right-click is difficult on Mac OS, everything ought to also be accessible through selection and the use of the menus (JIRA T2-237, T2-219). On the other hand, few Windows users requested the copy/cut/paste/delete to be available as a pop-up menu as well as keyboard shortcuts when supplying input.
"Delete from model" and "Rename" options are immediately adjacent - it is easy to accidentally remove things from the model instead of renaming. "Remove from model" should simply be physically separated from all the other right-click menu options, and the rest of the pop-up menu options grouped according to commonality in what they do. (JIRA T2-167)
Currently, there is no easy way to save, duplicate and share beanshell, r-shell, biomart components (or any other components that are configurable). That is, once a component is configured, there is no way to extract it from the workflow, and all configuration actions have to be repeated if the component is to be replicated (even within the same workflow). There is a need for a shared structured and curated libraries of such components, which users can use to upload to or download from.
Open the workflow "off-line" for editing and mark the failed processor when a workflow fails to open correctly.
No visual feedback while opening a workflow (such as a status bar), which takes a few seconds. (JIRA T2-248)
Have a "remember my decision" option on all the "Are you sure?" kind of decision dialogue boxes. (JIRA T2-175)
No warning if the graph is blank all the time due to a missing dot file or a missing Graphviz package (on Linux). (JIRA T2-234)
Creating string constants/default values at the moment requires 11 steps - this should be improved. (JIRA T2-230)
When starting Taverna or opening a new blank dataflow, the graph diagram is blank - it could have some suggestive text such as "To add an activity to the dataflow, select it from the Activity palette and drag it onto the diagram". There could also be another hint later if there are several activities with no connections between them hinting on how to create connections. (JIRA T2-225)
It is not possible to create input or output ports, or to rename and delete processors or links in the diagram without using right click. There should be ways to perform these actions in the diagram after selecting an item using a normal left-click, such as a toolbar or hovering icons in the diagram. (JIRA T2-219)
Misleading 'forbidden cursor' while dragging activity to diagram on Windows, even though diagram is a perfectly legal target for dropping the activity. (JIRA T2-215)
Cannot rename/remove processor from contextual view/configure. This is only possible from the graph view using right click. (JIRA T2-217)
Some users prefer graph view to tree view, so it should be possible to turn on/off these views.
Boring/Interesting processors from T1 (not yet in T2) should be called Show/Hide processors and made more obvious.
Metadata for services are not found particularly interesting at the moment (not yet implemented in T2).
'Remote usage' option from T1 should perhaps be a per-processor option and should go to contextual view in T2.
Altering timeout for services not easy to find (again contextual view).
How many times a service is invoked, execution time of services, etc.
XML splitter, what are they and what are they meant to do? (a documentation issue?) Too many of them clog up the workflow diagram, and they are only helper services.
How to use iteration? How to flatten lists? How to add new lines between list elements. How to configure various activities (contextual help JIRA T2-40)? How to pass binary data between services? ... (Usability + documentation issues).
Can't add new input/output without clicking on the graph. We need buttons for working with the graph view (not just for adding inputs and outputs, but for deleting stuff, etc.).
Save workflow diagram image missing.
Beanshell editor ignores Alt-keystrokes in OSX, not allowing characters like |

(4) Run/Results View

Should be able to stop a running workflow.
Should be able to close a running workflow.
Saving results - should be available from the 'File' menu. Confusing as to what is saved when in the results. (JIRA T2-233)
The use of red/green colours not very user-friendly for colour(green/red)-blind.
Seeing all the intermediate results in the workflow is needed (and not just final results), as is a possibility to turn off the retention of the intermediate values for "boring" processors eating up the precious memory resources.
Result items (and some other clickable items) do not handle right clicks properly - i.e. if they have not been selected previously then right click should produce a left click first to select the item. Otherwise, the right click does not work properly. (This is a T1 issue, in T2 this is fixed although right click does not work sometimes in the results pane - it does not make the result node selected).
The 'Run' view does not allow inspection of intermediate values. (JIRA T2-245)
The progress report currently not very useful - the error should be liked to the failed processor. Should be possible to copy errors from the progress report. In general, error reporting to the user is not very good in T2 - many messages are not meaningful for users or are not even reported to the user in an obvious way.
Different result renderers for outputs of different type; should be specifiable by the user; guessing the output type and opening in correct renderer.
Running a workflow from a particular point on, e.g. if the workflow has failed then do not execute the part that worked correctly but start from the point of failure.
Error reporting - some SoapLab errors are not fully displayed on the screen as XML message is too long.
When passing an input file to a workflow before running it (in T1, in T2 the equivalent seems not to be implemented yet) - after loading large datasets, the run button is hidden to the user has to scroll down to the very bottom of the window to find it.

A Compilation of Taverna Usability Issues