The majority of users access Ensembl through its web interface, making it a critical component of the project. It is generally recognized that major factors influencing website usability are speed and discoverability. As websites grow and their underlying databases become more complex, individual web pages tend to become larger, more complex and slower to display and it becomes harder for users to discover new functionality and navigate to the pages most appropriate to their query. The case of Ensembl is no different: the data contained in its databases is presented in different ways through a number of different ‘views’, which have been progressively added as project has developed, starting with relatively straightforward views summarizing information about a given gene, or displaying a region of genome sequence (16), to increasingly complex views such as TranscriptSNPView (17) showing sequence variation within a given transcript across a set of strains or individuals. At the same time, the amount of data contained in many views has grown, for example the increased number of species has greatly added to the data presented in views containing
