CLIENT

LBNL Agile BioFoundry

MY ROLE

Design Lead

OVERVIEW

The Agile BioFoundry is a consortium of national laboratories dedicated to accelerating biomanufacturing and decarbonizing the economy.

PROBLEM STATEMENT

The Agile BioFoundry at Lawrence Berkeley National Labs (LBNL) worked with us for a twelve week discovery and framing project where we uncovered common usability and accessibility issues across two of their applications. The Experiment Data Depot (EDD) is an interactive online application that serves as a standardized repository of experimental data. DIVA bioCAD (DIVA) is an online application that enables researchers to visually design DNA for downstream construction.

Methods

Personas

Design Studios

Contextual Inquiry

Usability Testing

Research Methodology

Discovery and Framing

The project started with a thorough two day kick-off, where stakeholders gave us a deep dive into the two applications we would be working with. Through extensive demos and a lot of “explain this to me like I’m five” conversations, the project team dug further into what this project meant to our stakeholders, what success looked like, and our definition of “done”. 

Because the nature of the work was very technical (very in depth biology and specialized AI), we leaned heavily on our stakeholders to piece together proto personas for each of the two systems, which we later validated with research.

We started auditing the two systems by performing heuristic evaluations, based on Jakob Nielsen’s ten principles for interaction design. We immediately uncovered some quick wins to improve the usability of the system.

Once we felt comfortable with each application’s use, we went straight to interviewing users and usability testing the current system.

Research Methodology

Persona Development

What type of users are we working with? We worked shoulder to shoulder with our client to come up with a set of "proto-personas", and then validated these with user research.

Personas

The Builders

These are a DIVA specific persona, made up of the DIVA build team. These are LBNL employees that function as material generators.

The Shepherd

These folks do the designing and the builds themselves most of the time. This group identifies as both a Shepherd and a Data generator.

The Data Generator

This is the person who adds data to EDD to studies that have already been created.

The Lone Warrior

These folks do the designing and the builds themselves most of the time. This group identifies as both a Shepherd and a Data generator.

Usability Solutions

After wrapping up our conceptual inquiries and usability testing, moved to problem framing techniques. We used Problem Statement Generation to frame the problems we were trying to solve for our users in an empathetic way.

From there, we generated How Might We Statements and ran ideation workshops with the entire team. Ideas were dot voted and placed on a 2x2 to determine priority.

We ended the engagement with a prioritized list of usability improvements and a new contract focused on accessibility.