Abstract
Nowadays, there is a significant increase in the number of Bioinformatics tools and databases. Researchers from various interdisciplinary fields need to use these tools. Usability is an important quality of software in general, and bioinformatics tools in particular. Improving the usability of bioinformatics tools allows users to use the tool to its fullest potential. In this paper, we evaluate the usability of two online bioinformatics tools Ori-Finder 1 and Ori-Finder 2 in terms of efficiency, effectiveness, and satisfaction. The evaluation focuses on investigating how easily and successfully can users use Ori-Finderl and Ori-Finder 2 to find the origin of replication in Bacterial and Archaeal genomes. To the best of our knowledge, the usability of these two tools has not been studied before. Twelve participants were recruited from four user groups. The average tasks completion times were compared. Many usability issues were identified by users of bioinformatics tools. Based on our results, we list recommendations for better design of bioinformatics tools.