July 17th — 21st
Coding Period
A short week this week due to travel, but we hosted a focus group of target users and got some valuable data. I also put some finishing touches on the Web of Registries and made UI adjustments after the focus group.
Monday, July 17th
The Web of Registries and SynBioHub should really integrate together to the point that it takes at most a button-click to set up the link between the two. (The only reason that a website wouldn’t self-enroll in the Web of Registries is that an administrator should have some content on an instance for it to be accepted.) I worked on making the enrollment process in the Web of Registries a one-click process, so that all you need to do to share your designs with other SynBioHub instances is have content on your site and press the button.
We also ran a focus group today with the wet-lab portion of the ICOS group here in Newcastle. It was very valuable and interesting to collect some data and make some observations on how our target users use the site as it currently is.
Tuesday, July 18th
Today, I worked on fixing lots of the small UI changes that our focus group users revealed yesterday. One of the common themes was that our forms are not always intuitive to fill out. For example, it does not specify anywhere on the registration form that the username cannot be the same as the email — it needs to be usable as part of a URI — so I wrote a small JavaScript function to guess a username based on your email. (65c1db1)

Wednesday, July 19th — Friday, July 21st
Due to some personal circumstances, I unfortunately had to cut my time in Newcastle a bit short. I travelled home over this period and spent a couple of days with my family.

