The Collaborative Metadata Repository (CoMetaR) Web App: Quantitative and Qualitative Usability Evaluation

In the field of medicine and medical informatics, the importance of comprehensive metadata has long been recognized, and the composition of metadata has become its own field of profession and research. To ensure sustainable and meaningful metadata are maintained, standards and guidelines such as the FAIR (Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, Reusability) principles have been published. The compilation and maintenance of metadata is performed by field experts supported by metadata management apps. The usability of these apps, for example, in terms of ease of use, efficiency, and error tolerance, crucially determines their benefit to those interested in the data.

This study aims to provide a metadata management app with high usability that assists scientists in compiling and using rich metadata. We aim to evaluate our recently developed interactive web app for our collaborative metadata repository (CoMetaR). This study reflects how real users perceive the app by assessing usability scores and explicit usability issues.

We evaluated the CoMetaR web app by measuring the usability of 3 modules: core module, provenance module, and data integration module. We defined 10 tasks in which users must acquire information specific to their user role. The participants were asked to complete the tasks in a live web meeting. We used the System Usability Scale questionnaire to measure the usability of the app. For qualitative analysis, we applied a modified think aloud method with the following thematic analysis and categorization into the ISO 9241-110 usability categories.

A total of 12 individuals participated in the study. We found that over 97% (85/88) of all the tasks were completed successfully. We measured usability scores of 81, 81, and 72 for the 3 evaluated modules. The qualitative analysis resulted in 24 issues with the app.

A usability score of 81 implies very good usability for the 2 modules, whereas a usability score of 72 still indicates acceptable usability for the third module. We identified 24 issues that serve as starting points for further development. Our method proved to be effective and efficient in terms of effort and outcome. It can be adapted to evaluate apps within the medical informatics field and potentially beyond.