A usability study of the Komen Virtual Tissue Bank

The Susan G. Komen for the Cure Virtual Tissue Bank application was evaluated for usability via established usability testing methods. Five subjects were each asked to perform five application tasks; the usability metrics gathered include time-on-task, task success, and issues with severity ratings. First, the study revealed that the application should provide better guidance when users are required to launch external applications. Second, results indicated that the layout of hyperlinks to searchable experimental datasets was confusing and should be redesigned. Moreover, the study showed that some subjects who were unsuccessful at completing certain tasks mistakenly believed they were successful. This indicates that the feedback delivered to the user by the application needs to be designed to remove ambiguities. Third, the authors speculate that the descriptive power of the System Usability Scale may be tailored to fit biodata repositories through exploratory factor analysis.