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User interface design for searching biomedical literature

Abstract:

Biomedical bibliographic sources are crucial resources for the work of physicians, biologists, and bioinformatics. Many of the genetic-medical diagnoses depend on the findings in these bibliographic sources. Despite the importance and value of the information stored in these repositories, the user interface (UI) of these resources does not provide the adequate mechanisms to interact with the content, converting the query and interpretation of the information into complex and time-consuming tasks. In this sense, improving the usability of these UIs becomes a challenge since this means facilitating the interaction, analysis and comparison of biomedical information, and, consequently, improving the productivity of professionals in this domain. This paper presents a UI design for the search of biomedical bibliography that incorporates solutions to the usability problems documented and detected by a study of the literature. The proposed design becomes a usability heuristic for UI designers facing the development of UIs in this domain.