Expasy, the Swiss Bioinformatics Resource Portal, as designed by its users

Abstract The SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics (https://www.sib.swiss) creates, maintains and disseminates a portfolio of reliable and state-of-the-art bioinformatics services and resources for the storage, analysis and interpretation of biological data. Through Expasy (https://www.expasy.org), the Swiss Bioinformatics Resource Portal, the scientific community worldwide, freely accesses more than 160 SIB resources supporting a wide range of life science and biomedical research areas. In 2020, Expasy was redesigned through a user-centric approach, known as User-Centred Design (UCD), whose aim is to create user interfaces that are easy-to-use, efficient and targeting the intended community. This approach, widely used in other fields such as marketing, e-commerce, and design of mobile applications, is still scarcely explored in bioinformatics. In total, around 50 people were actively involved, including internal stakeholders and end-users. In addition to an optimised interface that meets users' needs and expectations, the new version of Expasy provides an up-to-date and accurate description of high-quality resources based on a standardised ontology, allowing to connect functionally-related resources.

Behavior flow (all pages)

Direct access
• 64% to the home page • 12% to the /tools page The mission of EMBL-EBI, is to (i) make the world's public biological data freely available to the scientific community via a range of services and tools, (ii) perform basic research and (iii) provide professional training in bioinformatics.The EMBL-EBI website allows both the search for information on the institute itself (i.e.career pages, news, directory, ...) as well as the cross-resources search, and the discovery of the resources developed within the EMBL-EBI.A search bar is located at the top of the page and by default launches the 3 search types described above.A drop-down menu allows the user to refine his search by:  Scientific search with a list of categories such as Genomic or Small molecule, which launches a cross-resources search,  EBI content search, which allows, among other things, to discover the resources developed within the EMBL-EBI.The bio.tools portal provides a comprehensive registry of software and databases, facilitating researchers from across the spectrum of biological and biomedical science to find, understand, utilise and cite the resources they need in their day-to-day work.A search bar allows the user to search for all information related to the resources.Through autocompletion, the user can limit the search to a certain type of information (such as Name, Topic, Operation, Input, Output, to name a few).In bio.tools, the resources are described using EDAM terms.All terms are clickable in the resource entries, allowing the user to find more resources with a given term.The resource curation is community driven and is based on more than 1000 contributors.As of January 2021, 16570 resources were described in bio.tools.The BioCatalogue (https://www.biocatalogue.org/) The BioCatalogue is a curated catalogue of life science web services.The BioCatalogue website is freely accessible to the world thanks to a powerful search engine.Expert curators and users join forces to provide high quality annotations for services.A search bar is located at the top of the page, together with a link which leads to a list of all the BioCatalogue web services, which can later on be filtered by category thanks to a menu on the left.As of January 2021, 1431 web services were described in the BioCatalogue.The strengths of each of the four competitors are shown in

Supplementary File S3
Personas

Figure 4 :
Figure 4: Bio-tools home page

Table 1 :
Good practices found in the four Expasy's competitors

Table 1 :
Personas are built based on the insights from the preliminary user research.The table describes how the data from Google Analytics study are reflected in the personas' characteristics and/or behaviours.