Role
As a first designer assigned to the project, my responsibilities were User Research, Usability testing, Interaction design and Prototyping.
Prelude
In the winter of 2016 I have joined Seven Bridges, maker of cloud platform for analysis of genomic data. I was brought as an interaction designer to a small design team consisting of UI designer, several front-end engineers and a few interaction designers. In that time, company numbered just a little over hundred people, and rapid growth has started (it capped around 300 by the end of 2017).
The fact that the Design team was so small provided an opportunity to help teams working on diverse set of problems. Some of the most personally rewarding were:
- Tool for browsing petabytes of patient data
- SDK for bioinformatic tool developers
- First version of enterprise features
- Data viz product for exploration of genomic studies
I contributed by providing user experience research, product design, prototyping, critique and generally by being as helpful as I could. The outcomes of this were twofold - externally user satisfaction was higher, products enabled them new ways of doing their work and there was less need for support. Internally I helped (alongside bunch of smart, considerate folks) make a common ground for different stakeholders in multidisciplinary projects - through time some discussions shifted from “everything is equally important” to “we need to optimize for primary use case X”.
As the Nietzschean saying goes - it also changed myself - I learn to break work and iterate better, pick the important fights and let the rest go and a whole new world of cancer genomics opened up, with its fight against cancer, 3 billion base pairs per sample, various types of research and opportunities.
Understanding the domain
Data Browser, as its creative name suggests, helps cancer researchers mine data relevant to their research. The flow researcher usually goes through consists of few steps: