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

Research    >    Synthesize    >    Define    >    Design

User Adoption Challenges

Our user research revealed numerous hurdles to platform adoption, including:

• Data Security – Anyone familiar with the notion of “publish or perish,” knows researchers are very protective of their data, so many were wary of a cloud-based solution.

• Sharing – Due to this same need to be the first to publish, they outright dismissed the idea of sharing information with other labs, regardless of the benefit to the advancement of scientific knowledge. It was clear that without a true cultural shift, incentives wouldn’t be enough to encourage inter-lab collaboration. Such sharing would have to ultimately push all parties toward publishing.

• Open Source Tools – Many disparate tools with sophisticated capabilities were available for free. In academia, budgets are low, and labor is cheap, so there’s little incentive to pay for an all-in-one solution.

Adoption Strategy

Thus, providing features that appeal to researchers’ core values—publishing better insights and faster—with a low barrier to entry would be critical to adoption.

Opportunities included:

• Facilitate easier management of massive DNA sequencing files that are often delivered on a physical hard drive and take hours to process.

• Streamline the multi-step process of data transformation and analysis.

• Leverage the data that an active user-base would generate – i.e. success rates of various protocols

Roadmap included:

1. Customers are loyal to the client’s consumable products, so seamlessly moving ordering to the platform will get them in the door.

2. Offer MVP features that optimize the pain points in the research process, while collecting data.

3. Once data reaches critical mass, enhance recommendations with aggregate, crowd-sourced data to drive value. Build trust in this data generated by other labs.

4. Once the user base reached critical mass, introduce community features and inter-lab collaboration now that users trust external data.