[Alto 2.0] Design and Analyze

Nicoya

Overview

Nicoya is a small biotech company specializing in developing Surface Plasmon Resonance (SPR) instruments to help life science scientists in their research. Their flagship product, Alto, is the world’s first digital SPR instrument that helps scientists analyze samples of interest and identify lead candidates to develop further into their drug development pipeline. The Alto platform consists of a web-app where scientists can design and analyze their experiments, and an embedded software which is displayed on the instrument’s touch screen allowing scientists to run their designed experiment.

The Alto solution was going through a 6-month re-architecture project (Alto 2.0) to enable the scalability of the platform. Part of this initiative included optimizing existing user flows for the Design and Analyze features. This effort was achieved through the development and implementation of the Alto design system, re-organization of the information architecture, and the cleanup and reprioritization of existing features.

The redesign of the Design and Analyze user flows serves to better match the mental models of scientists that want to quickly design and efficiently analyze their experiments with confidence.

** This case study focuses on the Design feature redesign, which took the same design approach as the Analyze feature redesign.

My Role

I was one of the main designers leading this project gathering customer feedback from customer success (CS) teams, developing and maintaining a new Alto design system, designing hi-fi wireframes and prototypes to communicate the vision and handoff, while working with multiple cross-functional teams, including three product managers, four software engineers, three internal scientists, and two hardware engineers. I helped bridge communication between different teams to gain alignment, share design ideas and drive product decisions.

The Problem

From speaking with the CS team, we found that scientists relied heavily on support to help design and analyze their experiments due to broken features and user flows within the current Alto solution. Many novice scientists couldn’t understand how and what parameters to put in, and experts found the solution too limiting for their special use case experiments.

For MVP release, a redesign of the existing user flows was needed to build a strong foundation that will enable scientists with any level of experience to intuitively and efficiently design and build their research projects and allow flexibility for future features and tools.

Business Problem:

Since scientists are constantly asking for support from the CS team leading to an increase in time and resources supporting tasks that scientists should be able to do on their own. In addition, the many deals in the sales pipeline were waiting for the Alto 2.0 release that would include an improvement in the experience and usability of Alto.

Goal

Solution

Help Scientists work through their experiment, top-down.

• Left → right re-organization of parameters: using scientist’s mental models, this more logically follows how they would decide their experimental parameters.
• Declutter: to reduce the cognitive load on scientists, broken features, irrelevant information was removed.
• Temperature: originally found under Activities, this parameter sets the temperature for the whole experiment and was moved to an earlier step of the user flow to better match scientist’s mental models.

Simplify adding experiment conditions

• Accessibility: re-organizing adding experiment conditions as a drop down menu selection for the sample table so that it is more accessible.
• Simplify condition parameters: remove complication and focus on the important information for scientists when adding a new condition.
• Familiarity: using similar design styles as other components used in the design system, this new workflow brings familiarity for scientists.

Providing scientists with valuable information

• System Status: conveying to scientists the status of each step of building their experiment from build status to publishing to their team library
• Experiment summary: highlight important experiment parameters.
• Required materials: provide a readable list of materials needed for the next step of their workflow.

Design Approach

This approach was taken for both the Design and Analyze features. Each feature redesign took 2-3 weeks to complete within the 6 months of the Alto 2.0 project.

AUDIT

The goal of the audit was to understand the pain points scientists were experiencing with the current user flow and to identify any broken or irrelevant features to exclude for MVP.

In whole, the audit included:

• Moderated in-person/remote user interviews with internal scientists (experts who use Alto everyday).
• Collaboration with the Customer Success team to understand customer scientists and their current pain points and needs.
• Revisiting previous user studies I conducted to uncover any indirect insights applicable for this project.
• Audit of the current and previous done North Star designs so that the redesign would not deviate from where we needed to go, but could scale and improve the usability experience.

INSIGHTS

IDEATION

Given the research findings and audits, I went broad using the north star designs as inspiration and reviewed each idea with the lead architecture for technical feasibility, and worked with product managers for product and user goal alignment. We would eventually arrive at a design that met the requirements and I shared hi-fi wireframes in a stakeholder review.

We went through three rounds of stakeholder reviews with 1-3 days in-between for iteration and feedback implementation

DESIGN SYSTEM

I built a design system for Alto for each new component or asset being used during my ideation phase. After each stakeholder review, I iterated until we finalized the function, design and behaviour of each component and asset.

Part of this effort included ensuring that the redesigned solution was responsive for laptops, desktops, and the Alto touch screen (13” touch screen on the instrument) interfaces.

Final Solution

Handoff

The final handoff consisted of me walking through each user flow with the engineering team and product managers. I explained different states and use cases, and the specs of the components and assets used in the solution.

Results

With this redesign, scientists should be able to easily design and analyze their experiments with confidence. This project is still in development, but a few key metrics to track would be to see if there is a decrease in time spend by our CS team designing and analyzing Alto experiments for scientists, decrease in drop off rates during the analysis portion of the user journey, and an increase in sales from the Alto 2.0 project.

Reflections

🧐  Know your crowd:

I explored different methods to present the final designs to engineers based on their knowledge of the feature. To ensure an efficient hand off I used prototypes for when engineers had never seen or worked on a feature before, and hi-fi wireframes with user flows for ones that were familiar. I learned that communicating early with engineers to grasp their understanding of the feature and project was vital.

⏲  Rapid iteration is key:

Time was one of the most valuable and limited resources for me during this project. In order to meet the deadlines and keep the project moving forward, I iterated rapidly and learned that perfection is not always doable. I iterated rapidly, quickly gathered feedback and was able to make sure I presented and handed off solutions that met the project goals, priorities of what our product managers were asking for, and solutions that were feasible for engineers based on the development time.

🤸🏻  Be proactive and take initiative:

This project originally started with my manager and I, however after one month in I became the lead and only designer for this massage initiative. I quickly had to learn to step up and fill in as much of his role as I could.

I took the initiative to reach out to other teams like the customer success teams to gather insights on our users, build rapport and processes with software engineers for early design explorations and handoffs, collaborate with our internal scientists and product managers, and work with hardware engineers on the limitations and capabilities of our technology.

This was probably one of the hardest things I had to experience, but I was able to grow tremendously from learning how to receive feedback from through first-ever stakeholder design reviews, while learning how to defend my designs with research and data..