Lakhasly

Databases, software tools and on-line services are essential resources in the daily work of most life scientists. They are key to the long-term preservation of scientific data and the reproducibility of life science studies. As on-line bioinformatics usage spread and diversified, portals offering single access points were created (1,2) and later on, structured catalogues were proposed (3,4). In this landscape, the ExPASy portal pioneered. It was created in 1993 referred to as ‘the Expert Protein Analysis System’ with a primary focus on protein knowledge (5). It was the first life science website - and among the 150 very first websites in the world. In the past 27 years, the portal has evolved. It was redesigned several times and the penultimate version was released in 2011, when it became the ’ExPASy SIB Bioinformatics Resource Portal’, a catalogue of bioinformatics resources (6). As detailed in (7) SIB Swiss Institute of Bioinformatics federates a Swiss bioinformatics community now close to 800 scientists. In this context, hundreds of cutting-edge resources are developed and made available to the life science community. Among those, twelve key resources—the so-called SIB resources—receive specific support from the Institute and form the SIB Resource portfolio that ranges from specialised knowledge bases such as UniProtKB/Swiss-Prot (8) (part of the UniProt consortium), neXtProt (9), STRING (10) and Bgee (11), to online tools such as SWISS-MODEL (12) and SwissDrugDesign (13).

In this article, we describe the latest version of Expasy together with its redesign process that relied on rules of User-Centred Design (UCD). UCD combines User Research (UR), which addresses the question ‘Who is the target audience?’, with User Experience (UX), which addresses the question ‘How does the user interact with the application?’. Originating from the computer industry, UCD is emerging in science, as its value has been acknowledged (14,15). Expasy was improved to maintain access to SIB’s high-quality scientific resources and to offer up-to-date and accurate information on each of them, with a more efficient and easier-to-use search engine. Additionally, a networked organisation of resource descriptions was implemented, to broaden the scope of the initial search and explore the diversity of the SIB resources. The last new aspect to the portal is the involvement of resource providers in the content update of Expasy as a crucial step toward guaranteeing quality information. With this approach, the new version focuses specifically on resources developed by or in collaboration with SIB groups, in contrast with previous editions.