Life Science Research Platform

For a company that made its name as a manufacturer of consumable products for life science research, it can be difficult to convince your customer base to also see you as a legitimate provider of digital services, and even more difficult to then disrupt your industry with those services. But, that’s exactly what our client hoped to accomplish in order to safeguard their position as an industry leader well into the future.

Their vision was an extensive cloud-based platform for life science researchers that optimizes the entire experimental process—including literature review, hypothesis generation, experimental design, execution, analysis, and sharing/publishing—while offering recommendations and enabling collaboration along the way. Most importantly, this platform would empower researchers to gain deeper, actionable insights from their data as well as leverage the platform’s network of other researchers, aggregate data, and published insights to further their own research.

work completed with team at Fjord Austin

Project Type

product definition

Platforms

web app
mobile app

Tools

Audionote
Excel
Whiteboard
Sketch
Keynote

My Contribution

stakeholder interviews
user interviews
synthesis
feature definition
conceptual wireframes

 
 

Research    >    Synthesize    >    Define    >    Design

 

 

Group Synthesis

Team members recorded their key takeaways after each stakeholder and user interview. Then we came together for highly collaborative synthesis sessions with copious post its and whiteboard time, where several core themes emerged.

Output:

  • 4 stakeholder product goals

  • 4 stakeholder business goals

  • 5 core user insights

  • 6 design pillars

  • 7 user type profiles across 3 market segments

 
user spreadsheet 2.png

 

User Takeaways

While not feasible or necessary for all projects, I found it handy to also document user interview takeaways in a spreadsheet where I could tag each one for easy searching and sorting later on when defining a particular feature, for example. I also marked them as a pain point, value, or opportunity if applicable and added my own reflections right there.

 

 
Slides designed by other team members.

Slides designed by other team members.

Design Pillars

From the user insights, we generated a set of design pillars that served as core principles to guide the product design. Two examples include:

Flexible: We found that contemporary researchers are very independent and resourceful. They each work in their own unique way with whatever tools were most accessible, many of which were sophisticated open-source analysis tools. We concluded the platform would thus need to be highly customizable, omni-channel, and cross-platform. Also, to ensure researchers would do their analysis within the platform, it would need to be compatible with open source tools as well as competitor hardware and software.

Transparent: Our research also revealed a consistent and deep concern about “black box” solutions. So, users would need visibility into the algorithms and calculations behind any recommendation or automated task.

Working closely with the client, we also generated a final product statement. Together with the design pillars, these served as our north star for the project.

 

NEXT step

Define