Re: [Treebase-devel] ABI proposal for phyloinformatics

[Rutger V. <R....@re...>]

> In talking with Rob G, we
> are both really interested in UI, and we both have programmers in our groups
> who are working on various UI features for Tree Viz, so that would be an
> area where I think we would be interested to help the project as the interop
> details are hammered out.

Tree visualization and interaction design of web applications are two
different things. There is a lot of community expertise of the former
(and there are other people we might involve in this, e.g. Tamara
Munzner), but not enough of the latter. People complain about TreeBASE
in part because the workflows and visual metaphors aren't informed by
good HCI design, and this is not going to be addressed by better tree
viz. People will complain less about TreeBASE if we know why facebook
is nicer than myspace and apply those principles.

-- 
Dr. Rutger A. Vos
School of Biological Sciences
Philip Lyle Building, Level 4
University of Reading
Reading, RG6 6BX, United Kingdom
Tel: +44 (0) 118 378 7535
http://rutgervos.blogspot.com