 Are you interested in learning how to make the most of your scientific website, database or software tool? Would you like to learn how to transform users' feedback into valuable insight for new development in science? I am Chiara Gabella and here with Sefine DuVaux, we will show you the process that led to the new version of ExPASY, the Swiss Bioinformatics Resource Portal. The redesign involved dozens of users and allowed the transformation of the website from a resource catalog into a comprehensive discovery tool. In the end of this presentation, we will also show you in a demo how this brand new and intuitive website works. But first of all, what is ExPASY? ExPASY was created in August 1993 and was the first life science website and among the 150 very first websites in the world. It was initially a server focused on protein analysis and proteomics and in 2011, it became a catalog of bioinformatics resources developed by C-groups and other international groups. The latest version of ExPASY was released in October 2020 after an innovative redesign process. We will describe you here the key aspects of this work as an example of how users are fundamental for the success of your product. For a more comprehensive description, you can refer to the recent publication available in NAR, of which you can find the link in the description. In this work, we follow a user-centered approach, anticipating that optimized user interfaces and efficient organization of information are more conductive to scientific discoveries. Yet, professionals usually tend to wrongly assume that end users share their same views and behave in a similar way in a given situation. In reality, users have their own ways which do not necessarily correspond to the initial developer's vision of the product. In order to make sure that the tool will be usable and used, the user's expectation have to be taken into consideration at the very beginning of a project. That is where user-centered design, also referred to as user experience, comes into play. User experience encompasses all aspects of the end users' interactions with a system, namely websites, web or desktop applications in our case. User experience or UX follows one simple principle, put the users need in the first place in the design. In general, putting the user at the center of the redesign or the creation of a website allows to improve his satisfaction, leading to an increase of the website's frequency. With this in mind, let's see together how the redesign process was carried on. It all started with the definition of the strategy. In its last version, Expasi was a catalog of bioinformatics resources. In reality, resources at seed form a wide ecosystem of data resources and tools with significant dependencies and connections among them. They form a solid ground on which the life science can rely. The goal of the redesign of the website was to put forward the added value of Expasi by providing the users with an up-to-date discovery tool for bioinformatics knowledge and interconnected resources through a new website that would be user-friendly and also responsive on mobile devices. In user experience, the preliminary phase is essential for making informed decisions. In this phase, we run analysis, workshops and user interviews in order to assess the old Expasi according to usability, usage statistics and user behavior. We also evaluated a series of well-established portals in the world of life science, the so-called competitors. This allowed us to gain a significant insight into best practices and user experience improvement, leading to the creation of the first version of the so-called Warframe. A website Warframe is a visual guide that represents the skeletal framework of a website. The Warframe depicts the page layout or arrangement of the website's content including interface elements and navigational systems and how they work together. It has very limited typographic styles and graphics since the main focus lies in functionality, behavior and priority of content. In other words, it focuses on what a screen does, not what it looks like. A Warframe is employed in user tests, allowing for early feedback on products. Usually a Warframe is iteratively enhanced at each user test to produce an optimized prototype used by developers for implementation. The first version showed some important features, a unique search bar at the top, resources represented as small cards, identity cards, various filters to explore the resources, a detailed view with more information at each resource. You might also be interested in section, allowing to broaden the scope to similar resources. And finally, the results page in which the user could simultaneously see the results of its search with a regular search on the left with the results of the query across the resource description and a so-called cross resource search on the right, a feature that was already present in the previous versions that allows to query a subset of accessible databases in parallel. Because some of the design questions were still open for the elaboration phase, we organized an interactive workshop bringing together software developers, scientists, and communication and training specialists. The goal was to refine the Warframe before presenting it to the users. During this workshop, we made three major decisions. First, we agreed on the different categories and subcategories to be used to filter the resources. We also decided to stick with only one filter. Then, it was decided to provide all resources with expert-curated annotations managed by the resource providers. This ensures the quality and provides continuously up-to-date information on the website. And finally, it was decided to use an ontology called EDAM to link the resources. We'll describe this in a while. The iterative phase consists of meeting the users, showing them the Warframe and iteratively modified based on their feedback. It produced the final Warframe improved compared to the first version, with the unique search bar always on top of each page. The filters reduced to the categories placed on the left, a detailed view for each resource. The bottom part to browse other resources with similar topics. A single results page with on top the so-called cross resource search, the search of a biological entity into the selection of the subset of databases. And at the bottom, the regular search of the terms in the resource description. Finally, we launched the implementation phase. This phase includes the design with the creation of the new logo, the development of the user's and administrator interfaces, but also the updating of the re-annotated content. So let's have a look at the new Xpazee website. First, the home page. In the home page, we found a new logo and a single search bar at the top, filters on the left, and all resources listed as cards. By clicking on each card, we access the resource detail view, in which we can find names, descriptions, and useful information on the resource. We also have two boxes on the right with the keywords associated to the resource. Those keywords belong to the Edamontology, which classifies terms in bioinformatics into format main categories. Data, format, operation, and topic. Each term belongs to a tree of various subcategories that allows interconnect the resources on the border. Those categories are used in the right panel. Operations describe what the user can do with the resource, and data, format, and topic give searchable keywords associated to the resource. The bottom part you might also be interested in lists all the resources that share at least one keywords of type topic with the resource to which the page belongs. And finally, the results page with the two types of results. The cross-reference search results on top, that is the query into the database is in parallel, and then below the regular search result displaying the resources that have the query term in their name, description, keywords, or category. Now, to see Expasi in action, Severini is going to give you a little demo. Let's imagine you are a senior scientist interested in muscle development. You are looking for a general overview of information on the MF2C gene, and instead of searching info in each single database that you know, you want to quickly gather all data available in values databases. Expasi does the job for you. By typing MEF2C in the search bar, you can access the cross resource search that digs into a subset of sieve databases to provide direct information to the user. The results page returns the number of hits for the gene MEF2C that were found in the selection of databases. By clicking on the number of hits, the user is redirected to the query results in the respective databases. For instance, BG gives you information about its expression in tissues of value species. Uniprot KB allows you to access functional information on the proteins related to the gene, whereas Swiss model provides annotated 3D protein structures. Let's now imagine you are a junior biologist who is just starting a PhD in bioinformatics. You don't know much about bioinformatics resources and would like to explore the existing areas in the domain. You are also eager to discover tools and databases in life sciences. Let's say that your field of expertise is glycomics. In Expasi, you can browse the existing resources related to your field. There are two ways of doing this. You can either filter the resources by category through the filter bar on the left. Another way to achieve this is to type glycomics in the search bar. The list of relevant resources can be found in the second part of the results page, the so-called regular search part. You can then navigate across the various resources, discover what we can do with them, and be suggested a bunch of resources of potential interest for you. Those two searches work in parallel. A user searching information on COVID-19 gets two types of results at the same time. Information on COVID-19 are available in four databases and was found, for instance, in two entries in Cilosaurus and six entries in NexPROT. Also, the portal indicates that 19 resources are related to COVID-19, such as Procite, Swiss model repository, Virazone, NexTrain, GlyConnect, SIPCOVID-19, Integrated Knowledge Base, to name a few. The user can click on their names to find out more about them. The new version of NexPROT was released in October 2020. Since then, an increase of 15% in the number of daily users compared to the same period last year is observed, and the traffic from mobile devices has increased from 6% to 10%. NexPROT provides up-to-date, high-quality, interconnected resources that form a solid ground on which the life science community can stand. The portal is a gateway to bioinformatics, available to expert users, beginner researchers, teachers, students, and more. The new version of NexPROT aims to create a satisfactory user experience. Our user-centric approach was successfully applied in all phases of development and proves that user experience is a valuable asset also in science. Developers are highly encouraged to involve their users from the very beginning of their projects. A paper has been published in NAR. It acknowledges the entire process of this innovative approach. We encourage you to read it. We also encourage you to visit Ecspasy and leave us your feedback. Thank you for listening.