1. Scientific workflow systems are problem-solving environments designed to allow researchers to perform complex tasks simply by piecing together individual units to create a workflow that fulfils their goals. These systems have been designed to provide a wealth of functionality to facilitate the needs of researchers. However, often this focus on functionality has resulted in usability issues being overlooked. So we have a raft of software with amazing capabilities of problem-solving and analysis, but it’s being delivered in a way that makes it very hard for researchers to get the benefit of these capabilities! We need to find ways to give researchers the means to exploit this functionality which is available to them, so that the tools are tailored to their needs and support what they try to achieve. Decades of research has gone into improving user interfaces to better meet the needs of users, so we now have many guidelines and techniques to take the tasks users perform and create software to achieve them with ease. But workflow systems are quite unlike much of the software that has come before them and so provide different challenges, so these systems provide an interesting context in which to further explore themes of usability. The research involves applying original thinking to the process of using these workflow systems in order to devise ways of improving their usability, be it through adaptation of established HCI techniques or through the development of interesting new ideas. The ideas which may give the greatest improvement in usability will be chosen and prototyped to evaluate their potential benefits to researchers. Evaluation of current workflow systems, investigation of existing techniques of improving usability, and discussion amongst researchers suggested a series of ideas for how to improve workflow usability. These ideas included: Use of templates to create workflows from pre-formed constructs More flexible use of previous content such as previous results or incorporating part of a previous workflow into a new one An intelligent system to aid in the selection and definition of tasks A “Workflow Wizard” - intelligent guide through workflow construction An API is being developed to enable the prototypes to work with a number of underlying workflow systems, so that those workflow systems can better provide for the needs of the researchers. The hypothesis for the work is that through application of original ideas and existing HCI concepts we can provide a better means of supporting researchers using workflows. The intention is that ideas can be developed into a tool that can sit on top of existing workflow systems to improve their usability and to aid researchers by facilitating processes such as exploratory design and “what if” experimentation. By developing the current ideas into a working system we can begin to evaluate this through the use of researchers as a means of feedback, providing a tangible assessment of how effective the new ideas have been at helping to facilitate their work. The “Workflow Wizard”, by breaking the process of workflow creation down into distinct stages, provides a possible way of simplifying workflow design. Questions remain as to whether it will be possible to allow a user to achieve everything they could in the wizard as they would be able to in the standard workflow environment. The idea of an “Intelligent System” has proved interesting, reducing the work on the users part to specifying what they want to achieve, leaving the system to infer how this is achieved in a workflow. It will be important to ensure that any system can effectively retrieve the needs of the user, and accurately model this as a workflow. I Aim to finish evaluating potential ideas and to define the API so a clear concept for an improved system can be taken on for further improvement and evaluation. A representation of the current “Workflow Wizard” prototype